Turntable advice / opinion on setup / sound.

@faustuss 

I already mentioned Ortofon, any others?

still waiting for that list of ANY other 14mm height cartridges?.

Hearing something like the Viv Float arm will make one question how important is getting tracking angle error minimized.  In the Viv Float maker's view, arm rigidity and minimizing skating force is much more important.  To me the vivid sound of systems with that arm suggests that they may be right (or at least doing something else very well).  Their arm has a maximum deviation from tangency to the groove of ten degrees.  That means it will also have a skating force associated with such error.  But, that is the maximum error and occurs over only the beginning and end of the record, and it is far less than the skating force associated with the about 22 degrees of offset angle for the headshells of typical fixed arms.  While anti-skating will reduce skating force, it is a VERY crude compensation and it is better to reduce skating and eliminate anti-skating. 

These days, I question the need for ultra-precise setting of cartridge geometry.  I do it because I have the tools and the ability (so why not?).  The finding that even extremely expensive cartridges are subject to massive zenith error coming out of the factory makes it seem even more absurd to fret about small errors.  I do hear the result of other cartridge setup changes, such as VTA/SRA so I make such adjustment carefully, primarily by ear--I set the arm parallel to the record surface and then make adjusts by ear from there.

@elliottbnewcombjr 

"still waiting for that list of ANY other 14mm height cartridges?."

There probably aren't any and because Rega is so competitive in the turntable market it was advantageous for Ortofon to market a cartridge specifically for their turntables. Rega, up until they discontinued it, probably shipped more Elys IIs in a year than Ortofon ships in it's whole cartridge line. 

They made it different from all others, ON PURPOSE. It is 'Proprietary Greed',

Just Like Apple!.

Larry, As you may already know, I own a 9 inch Viv and like it very much with all the qualities you mention.  Mentioning it here seems to provoke certain people, so I prefer to keep mum.  My cumulative experience leads me to think that surely tracking angle error must matter at some point, meaning there must be some amount of TAE that would begin to produce very noticeable distortion, but the mania over TAE is perhaps uncalled for within reasonable limits.  Conversely, one explanation for the excellent performance of the Viv Float (and incidentally my old RS Labs RS-A1 tonearm) is that TAE within the boundaries exhibited by those two tonearms is less important than is the skating force induced by the effort to minimize TAE (by designing tonearms with overhang and headshell offset which enhances skating) and the efforts to correct for skating with anti-skate. In a conventional tonearm with headshell offset, the skating force is applied at the stylus tip; whereas anti-skate is applied very near to the pivot.  Yes, this arrangement can keep the cantilever from being bent, but it must also put a tension on the cantilever in the horizontal plane, as it must transmit, along with the arm wand, the two opposing forces of skate and AS.  Maybe that is not so good for the capacity of the cantilever to respond freely to lateral displacement induced by the signal in the grooves. Maybe this in part accounts for the success of the Viv et al.