Spin Doctor #17: Paging Dr. Löfgren, ViV Laboratory's Rigid Float 9ha tonearm

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.

Carr went on to explain how pretty much every tonearm aligns the cartridge with an overhang and offset angle to minimize the tracking angle error, but that this also results in an undesirable skating force, which needs to be counteracted with some kind of antiskating device on the tonearm. His belief is that the counteracting skating and antiskating forces rob the cartridge of some of its energy and dynamics, resulting in sound that's less lively and engaging than it could be. Carr then spoke about how some audiophiles, especially in Japan, embrace the use of what's known as a pure straight tonearm, with no offset angle, thereby minimizing the skating force and the associated need to use antiskating. But this approach comes with a price.

Because a record-cutting lathe cuts the lacquer in a straight line, in a perfect world we should use a tonearm that keeps the stylus perfectly in line with the groove across the entire side of the record. Over the years, there have been many linear tracking tonearms that do this with varying degrees of success, including models from Clearaudio, Eminent Technology, Goldmund, and Bergmann. More recently, there have been designs that look more like a traditional pivoting arm but maintain perfect alignment with the groove through the use of a rotating headshell (as with the Thales tonearms) or by moving the pivot point (as with the Schröder LT and Reed 5A). But linear arms are complicated beasts; some require drive motors, air compressors, or a multitude of bearings and joints. The Reed 5A uses a laser beam, which would undoubtedly make Austin Powers happy.

Long before anyone considered trying to make a linear tracking tonearm, some very smart people with excellent math skills figured out how to minimize tracking angle errors as the stylus moved in an arc across the record. If you moved the stylus in an arc that passed slightly forward of the center hole, then cocked the cartridge inward by a few degrees to match the angle of the groove at that point, the stylus would pass through two points at which it was perfectly in line with the groove. Between and outside those points, errors would be greatly reduced.

This approach was first proposed by Bela Harsanyi in a French patent as far back as 1908. It was expanded in an article titled "Needle Track Alignment" by Percy Wilson in The Gramophone in September and October 1924. But this was still the era of windup acoustic gramophones with steel needles. It wasn't until Swedish professor Erik Löfgren's groundbreaking 1938 paper that modern thinking about phono cartridge alignment became firmly established. Löfgren proposed three alignment strategies (Löfgren A, B, and C), with Löfgren A being the preferred alignment when both overhang and offset angle are adjustable.

Today, Löfgren A is commonly referred to as Baerwald, and therein lies an interesting story. Because Löfgren's 1938 paper was published in what at the time was Nazi Germany, in a relatively obscure German-language publication, it wasn't until H.G. Baerwald's 1941 article, Analytic Treatment of Tracking Error and Notes on Optimal Pick-Up Design, published in the Journal of the Society of Motion Picture Engineers in December 1941, that this work gained widespread recognition. Baerwald presented his own calculations, which produced results identical to Löfgren's, and while he gave a nod in his paper to the Swede, for many decades it was assumed that Baerwald's work came first, with Löfgren's earlier seemingly lost forever.

Finally, in 1983, a copy of Löfgren's paper was located in Czechoslovakia, revealing that it had been published three years before Baerwald's. Still, to this day, most people refer to Löfgren A alignment as Baerwald and to Löfgren B as simply Löfgren.

In the decades following Löfgren and Baerwald, several others analyzed the problem and published papers, but most simply came to conclusions that mirrored Löfgren's. Notably, J.K. Stevenson in 1966, and D.D. Brakemeier (UNI-DIN) in 2010, used fresh thinking that took into account the differences between the requirements for playing a mono shellac standard groove 78 in 1938, and a modern stereo vinyl LP.

What if we took all this scholarly study and analysis and simply tossed it out of the window? On some level, that's the thinking behind the ViV Lab Rigid Float tonearm.

ViV Laboratory Rigid Float 9ha Tonearm
In Spin Doctor #5, I discussed how turntable and tonearm designers normally fall into one of two camps: the obsessive machinists who take a conventional design approach and execute it to perfection, and the deep thinkers who reject convention, preferring to write their own rules. Well if there ever was a deep-thinking designer, it is Koichiro Akimoto, the founder of ViV Laboratory (footnote 2).

After creating ViV in 2008, Akimoto took an idea that had gained some traction among Japanese audiophiles—the pure straight tonearm mentioned by Carr in that YouTube video—then added a few of his own design twists. I first became aware of the pure straight approach about 30 years ago when I was installing a cartridge for a Japanese audiophile here in New York City. My job was to install a new cartridge on his SME Series V tonearm in the conventional way, but I couldn't help noticing a second tonearm on the back of the turntable with a Koetsu cartridge on it, with no offset angle. He explained that eliminating the offset angle eliminated the need for antiskating compensation, albeit at the cost of higher tracking-angle error. His reasoning was that the skating force generated by the offset angle, and the antiskating force applied by the arm to oppose it, did more to degrade the sound than the straight arm's increased tracking angle error did to increase it. He played it for me, and it sounded good, but my mind was too deeply rooted in convention to contemplate this as a good idea.

Antiskating is a topic that seems to generate a lot of misinformation from people who really should know better, from "it really isn't important" to "it's a centripetal and/or centrifugal force" to "you need more antiskating at the end of the side than at the start." All these statements are just plain wrong, but the truth isn't very straightforward either.

In the real world, the perfect antiskating force is a constantly moving target, which fluctuates with the modulation level of the record groove, the position of the stylus on the record, the vertical tracking force, and the stylus profile of the cartridge. The so-called perfect setting is just the best compromise, taking all of these variables into account and balancing them out over time. At any given moment, the amount of antiskating force being applied is invariably wrong, so the ViV Labs arm simply gets rid of the skating force by eliminating the offset angle and making the arm straight.


Footnote 1: See youtu.be/fQeut0__a_4?si=GxkXijJXR36Ftvdw.

Footnote 2: ViV Laboratory, 5-10-16 Imaizumidai Kamakura Kanagawa 247-0053 Japan. Email: Info@vivaudiolab.com Tel: +81 467-67-4495. USA importer: Sierra Sound, PO Box 510, Wilton, CA 95693. Email: info@sierrasound.net Web: sierrasound.net

ARTICLE CONTENTS

COMMENTS
orfeo_monteverdi's picture

"Over the years, there have been many linear tracking tonearms that do this with varying degrees of success, including models from Clearaudio, Eminent Technology, Goldmund, and Bergmann"

Not to be forgotten: Polish manufacturer Pre-Audio offers what could be the most affordable silent air-bearing linear tracking turntables on Earth.

I could not afford the big names. So I bought a $4850 Pre-Audio DE1800. Magnetic platter bearing, granite base, air-bearing linear tracking arm, silent compressor.
Excellent value for money. I couldn't be more happy.
(carefully choose a matching cartridge and phono preamp though, as that deck can sound extremely detailed)

DE1800

Glotz's picture

I need to hear and see this!

Doug in CT's picture

Dear Michael -
You write that "...the ViV Labs arm simply gets rid of the skating force by eliminating the offset angle and making the arm straight."
Unfortunately, a straight pivoted arm will skate just like a pivoted arm with offset, because it's not the offset that causes skating. J.M. Boisclair and Andrzej Malewicz of WAM Engineering demonstrated this convincingly several years ago.
Michael Fremer gave a summary of their analysis, with links to videos that help visualize the concepts, in a 2020 article for Analog Planet. It's still available at (https://www.analogplanet.com/content/everything-you-know-about-skating-wrong).
In short, pivoted arms exhibit skating --both inward at the beginning of a side and outward toward the end of the side-- because they are essentially similar to a pendulum swinging back and forth across the low point of an arc. Instead of gravity being the force that pulls the arm/pendulum back toward the low point, it is the surface drag of the vinyl.
Skating also occurs on blank record sides, in the same way, so it is likewise unrelated to groove modulations or other such features.
One further point: I haven't watched the talk by Jonathan Carr of Lyra that you mention, but I doubt that he envisioned tracking error of 10% (as with the ViV) when he said that minimizing tracking error is less important than other aspects of cartridge setup. Any halfway-decently aligned cartridge will have tracking error no higher than 4% and probably less than that. That level of error is in fact less than the typical sample-to-variance between cartridges from a single manufacturer.

Trenton Carr's picture

"so the ViV Labs arm simply gets rid of the skating force by eliminating the offset angle and making the arm straight."

So wrong, it's funny.

Skating force is a geometry problem, and this tonearm has it.

SF is a result of effective length tangent to groove error, not over/underhang or headshell offset.

I'm flabbergasted a designer would lead with that in marketing.

Show the behaviour on a blank disc and let the results speak for themselves. My bet is it will settle 2/3 in. If it is not stable at every drop point, it skates. Easy to prove right or wrong, yet no designer will show that.

sierrasound's picture

https://youtu.be/Jzd0jNgf_q8

You're right that the skating isn't at zero across the face of the record. Only a linear arm could achieve that. But the skating force is miniscule compared to an arm with overhang, which leads to better lateral stability.

Trenton Carr's picture

In your video, you mention the higher friction due to groove modulation, however, the difference in magnitude is minimal. You can FEM simulate this minor difference with a textured surface corresponding to the information in the groove.
Your video effectively demonstrates that the arm skates, which is a crucial point and contradicts the text of the article.

A major issue with your demonstration is that the coefficient of friction is only one component of skate force. Increasing the friction when the arm is already at the tangent to groove point, where there is no skate force, will result in no skate force. Even if you ran your stylus over a brick at that point, there would still be no skate force. For transparency, you should have placed the sticky note near the start or end of the groove and observed the stylus behaviour, which would likely be very similar to that of the Technics.

In fact, if you install the cartridge on the Technics with a similar tangent to groove position and ran it over the same sticky note, the behaviour would be identical, and it could also claim AS is not required.

A no-skate tonearm is impossible with a fixed effective length pivoting tonearm, and you can make the Technics behave exactly the same.

All high-end audio products suffer from perception and bias issues, even if an effect from an underlying truth cannot be perceived, it will still have an effect on the purchase decision. I build and design pivoting tangential tonearms for a singular customer, and although it is not perfect, it is still loved.

Please do not take this as reason that no one could love and enjoy your tonearm.

sierrasound's picture

However, I don't see a big contradiction between your points and what is illustrated in my video. We are not claiming the ViV Lab arm achieves zero skating force along the entire record surface. We are claiming that it is zero at the null point, and the rest of the time it is so diminished as to become insignificant, to the point where a counteracting anti-skate force is not required.

One point I disagree with though, you said "you should have placed the sticky note near the start or end of the groove and observed the stylus behaviour, which would likely be very similar to that of the Technics"

If I did this on the ViV arm, the skating force would become temporarily increased from the friction and move toward the null point faster. However it would not behave like the Technics, which oscillates laterally as the skating force constantly fights against the anti-skating force. The ViV would simply settle toward the null point and stay there.

A traditional arm with overhang and anti-skate encounters 2 opposing lateral forces simultaneously, skating and anti-skating. They fight each other constantly as friction varies and one force overtakes the other.

With the Rigid Float there can only ever be skating force in one direction- toward the null point. And this force is tiny compared to an arm with a big overhang. So that's where we feel that this design has an advantage.

Thanks for engaging and discussing. You've obviously given the issue a lot of thought and I hope our discussion, regardless if we agree or not, will be enlightening for those who read it.

Trenton Carr's picture

Apologies, I did not get that, "We are claiming that it is zero at the null point, and the rest of the time it is so diminished as to become insignificant, to the point where a counteracting anti-skate force is not required." from the article.
And every tonearm with a tangent to groove point, does not require AS, as you claim then.

Also, the Technics should not be oscillating as the spring acts as a constant load and there is no fight between the 2 forces, if it's oscillating, there is a compliance problem. The force you think is making the Technics oscillate is this big --> 0.0009N, yep, small enough to be sunk by the tonearm's inertia from the effective weight, counterweight and the compliance in the stylus. I suspect you are overestimating the effect the degree of modulation the groove has on the skate force. These forces are tiny.

"The ViV would simply settle toward the null point and stay there."
True for all tonearms with a tangent to groove point, and all the music is not at that point as well as being locked in groove.

"With the Rigid Float there can only ever be skating force in one direction- toward the null point. And this force is tiny compared to an arm with a big overhang. So that's where we feel that this design has an advantage."
You can set up any tonearm the same way, and it will behave the same, and if that works for you, Great!

Good Luck!
I wish for you all the best for your tonearm, I want more tonearms on the market, not less.

Glotz's picture

I wanted to see the tonearm in situ, but from a distance.

Love the design approach. This arm is very intriguing and thanks for this comprehensive look and the column once again.

Oh, and the proof is in the listening- as you found!

sierrasound's picture

I uploaded a few more photos showing the arm's complete form:

www.sierrasound.net/downloads

I have some photos of the arm in action on different turntables as well, email me if you'd like to see them.

mike@sierrasound.net

Glotz's picture

Thanks, Mike!

Ortofan's picture

... Yamaha GT-5000 turntable, which has a straight tonearm.
He can query Yamaha about their rationale for excluding anti-skate compensation.

https://usa.yamaha.com/products/audio_visual/hifi_components/gt-5000/index.html

https://www.hifinews.com/content/yamaha-gt-5000-turntable

directdriver's picture

https://youtu.be/fQeut0__a_4?t=1110

sierrasound's picture

and thanks to all who read it. I love this tonearm and everyone who hears it has nothing but good things to say, and I'm glad Mike feels the same.

I see in the comments that there is still some skepticism and misunderstanding, so I made a video that will hopefully clear up a lot of questions about skating, anti-skate, and the pros and cons of traditional geometry. Here is the link:

https://youtu.be/Jzd0jNgf_q8

There is much more to this arm than the unconventional geometry. The ferro-fluid bearing is a totally unique element and creates a near-zero amount of friction while still providing excellent energy damping. This, along with the free-standing nature of the arm, has as much to do with the tonearm's performance than the geometry. And by the way, the sound is clear as a bell, you will not hear distortion even if you think you should...

Finally, for those who asked for more pictures, they have been uploaded to our website:

www.sierrasound.net/downloads

Thanks again to all who have taken the time to learn about this special tonearm.

Sincerely,

Michael Fajen
President, Sierra Sound

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