Tonearm Reviews

At the 2013 High End Show, in Munich, a tonearm designer displayed a pivoting tangential tracker. A nearly invisible length of monofilament wrapped around the arm's perimeter controlled the pivoting headshell of the box-girder–like arm.

It may very well have worked as promised, but was it practical? And with so many tiny moving parts, would it sound any good? I don't know—it was a silent display—and inquisitive attendees kept bumping the difficult-to-see monofilament, dislodging it from its track.

The odds weren't good that this contraption, however well intended, would ever get past the prototype stage, though I was going to look for it at the 2014 Munich show, in May. Sometimes, designers obsessed with one particular performance parameter lose sight of the forest for the trees.

The designer of ViV Lab's Rigid Float tonearm, Koichiro Akimoto, also had in mind an unusual design goal, based on his belief that the geometry of pivoted tonearms, as we know it, is wrong.

In his review of the J.Sikora Initial turntable, Stereophile's resident artist/sage Herb Reichert wrote, "Extended bathing, lighting candles, making tea, and preparing food are ritual work forms that prepare my senses to accept both pleasure and illumination."

When it comes to playing records, I too have a ritual. It involves carefully cleaning the vinyl, first on a Pro-Ject VC-33, followed by immersion in a HumminGuru Ultrasonic vinyl cleaner. Before and after, I inspect the record's grooves with a pricey VisibleDust Quasar R magnifier. Only then—black coffee hot, glasses cleaned, stylus brushed free of contaminants, notepad at hand—am I ready to receive the messages ingrained in a shiny black vinyl disc.

In my January 2014 column, I reviewed HiFiction's Thales TTT-Compact turntable and Simplicity tangential-tracking pivoted tonearm, an intriguing combo from Micha Huber, a talented Swiss watchmaker turned turntable designer.

The TTT-Compact's particulars, including its battery-powered motor and exceptional ease of setup, are described in detail in that review, which includes a link to a useful animation that shows how the design, as Huber says, "reduces the perfectly tangential tracking to pivot points, while the pick-up cartridge is taken and aligned on the Thales' Circle."

Suffice it to say that while the HiFiction tonearm is named Simplicity, its design is anything but.

Perhaps the most intriguing aspect of the MoFi Electronics MasterDeck turntable ($5995), as the brainchild of Allen Perkins in his role as MoFi's Chief Analog Designer, lies in the question of how his background as a jazz drummer has shaped his approach to turn table design. How does the rhythmic sensibility of a percussionist translate into the meticulous engineering of a turntable?

"It's a little complicated," Perkins wrote over email. "Being a drummer, I am sensitive to timing in music, so it makes me sensitive to problems. However, it does not provide any direction for solutions. It could be seen as an annoying awareness as a listener, like perfect pitch. In my case, it is an advantage because I love to solve problems, in general, so I persevere and have a built-in sense to assess what I've done."

Like romance or car racing, the act of playing records is tactile by design. Like drifting through curves or making out, spinning vinyl is a learned skill that requires users to touch everything with practiced assurance.

To play a disc with Technics' new SL-1300G record player means pushing its round On button, then touching one or more of its rectangular speed selector buttons, then pushing the big square [Start:Stop] button, then unclamping the tonearm and using its cue lever to raise it up.

Next comes the part where my heart beats a little faster: using the headshell's fingerlift to position the arm over the disc and lower it into a groove.

When the needle contacts the groove, the whole system kicks in and sound comes out.

It's difficult to believe that more than five years have passed since Ortofon introduced its ground-breaking MC A90 moving-coil cartridge ($4200 when last available). The limited-edition MC A90, with its radically shaped body made of powdered stainless steel Selective Laser Melting (SLM), celebrated Ortofon's 90th year in business. The MC A95 ($6500), celebrating their 95th year, retains the A90's seductive shape, but the new body is built of powdered titanium, and thus is even more effectively self-damped.

It started one evening when I was killing time watching YouTube videos and stumbled across a 2017 talk given by Jonathan Carr, Lyra's brilliant cartridge designer (footnote 1). After discussing his design and Lyra's manufacturing processes for about 18 minutes, Carr opens the floor to questions. Someone asks which of the many cartridge setup parameters he feels is the most important. I was floored when the first thing Carr said was that "horizontal tracking error is not very important at all." What? I couldn't believe I was hearing this from the guy who writes owner's manuals with super-specific specifications, like tracking force measured to a 100th of a gram and loading recommendations with wide but oddly specific ranges like 97.6 to 806 ohms. Did he really believe that the tonearm geometry calculations of Löfgren, Stevenson, et al, weren't such a big deal?

For decades I have painstakingly used the best tools available to perfect these settings with every cartridge I install; now a guy whose opinion I respect deeply is saying it's not very important.