Tri-Planar with no anti-skate?

I have never set up a Triplanar arm, but, with every arm I have set up, when doing antiskating adjustment by ear (using torture test records or just long term listening), the setting I find that works is MUCH lower than that which the arm manufacturer recommended. This has been the case with both Graham 1.5t and Phantom arms, for the Vector 3 arm, and SME IV arm.

I believe that VPI concluded that the antiskating mechanism itself causes more sonic harm than skating forces (more loose parts to resonate and muck up the sound), but, was forced by the market to add such mechanism to their arms.

I wonder if anyone would dare to apply surgery to their expensive arm to remove such devices totally to see if that improves the sound.

Larry, that's what we've been discussing. Some of us ARE removing the AS mechanism completely from our Triplanars. Not much surgery really. Just a single cir-clip and set screw holding the thread.

Lew: How about the Stevenson alignment used by dv507 (pivoted arm) which supposely put the null point at the innermost track? The advantage of this approach is to minimize tracking error and hence reduce skating.

Where can I read more about skating force?

I suspect our differences may rest on location of the groove and the terminology. Are you refering to the general schemes of different alignment? Stevenson have increased average tracking error across the record but less skate force at the innermost tract. L and B have less averaging tracking error but increased skating at the innermost track.

I am refering to the actual forces acting on the stylus at the innermost tract. The fact that Stevenson can feature least amount of skating at the inner groove is deal to minimizing tracking error at the inner most groove ( null point).

Where can I read more about skating?

Dear Glai, If you are asking me, try searching the Vinyl Asylum for discussions of skating force. Some pretty knowledgeable guys used to post on these topics, altho of late (the last year or two) most threads are about trivia. Or, try Google.

AFAIK, the various tonearm alignment geomtrys (Stevenson, Lofgren, Baerwald, etc), are about where to place the two possible null points along the path of the stylus from outer to inner groove, and to minimize average tracking error in between those two null points. (Where "null points" means points where there is zero tracking error. You can only have two of them in an arc traversed by a pivoted tonearm.) The Stevenson geometry happens to place the innermost null point closer to the spindle than any other standard geometry, which is why Stevenson is not commonly used any longer, or so I was led to believe; most tonearm designers favor placing the null points toward the outer groove for maximum fidelity. The various geometrys will affect skating force insofar as the optimum tonearm offset angle will be different for each geometry. I'd have to think more about that, though.