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Tradeoffs

Posted by Larry I (A) on February 23, 2009 at 15:16:29

In Reply to: 12 inch tonearms ? posted by Iain42 on February 22, 2009 at 14:37:49:

The choice involves certain tradeoffs. I have no personal experience regarding the audibility of the distortion from a lack of tangency. What I do know, from experimentation, is that small changes in VTA can be quite readily heard. For a given change in thickness of a record, a longer arm will move through a smaller arc than a shorter arm, meaning VTA change is smaller. Because I don't care to change VTA with each record, I would consider that to be one of the biggest advantages of a longer arm.

The disadvantage has to do with mass, particularly inertial mass for longer arms. The longer arm itself means more mass, but it also means that a lot of that mass is concentrated well away from the pivot (cartridge sitting way out on the end of the arm). Higher inertial mass means that when the arm encounters a warp, the arm resists moving up and down in following the warp moreso than a lower mass arm set to the same tracking force. This would have been a much bigger issue in the old days (1970-80) when high compliance cartridges were the rage (high compliance cartridges require low mass arms) and the available materials for making light, but rigid and low resonant arms were less available. Today, arms are routinely made from titanium and carbon fiber, etc, making the mass/rigidity/resonance control tradeoffs less significant for longer arms.

As for sound, I've heard a number of really nice sounding longer arms, but I've also heard really nice 9" arms, too. I would bet that the optimal tradeoff would depend on other factors, like how much the cartridge requires dampening/draining of vibrational energy -- some cartridges, like the Lyra Titan, have very rigid bodies designed to transmit such energy to the arm instead of the cartridge itself supplying the dampening.

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