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In Reply to: Sorry, Tubes, that's nonsense posted by Dave Pogue on May 7, 2007 at 16:17:21:
The very fact that VPI now sells a bias unit is proof that they required one for current and future customers.Flying blind is one thing...liking it is a whole different issue.
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Sorry, tubes and everone else I've just offended. Harry Weisfeld's original anti-skating scheme for the JMW arm was elegant and very effective. I have a JMW 10.5 and can assure you that its wire-twist approach works wonderfully well. No inner groove distortion, tracks like a champ, plays the first three of those Hi-Fi News "torture tracks" without incident, last time I tried. But it's "unconventional" and thus, in some eyes, doomed.But to really get a fix on the subject you need to play with an RS-A1 arm, as I have for the past month. Straight flat arm, no offset, NO ANTI-SKATING, decoupled headshell, decoupled counterweight (free to swing in the breeze), an undamped unipivot ... and the entire arm just sits there on the armboard, unattached to it. When set up properly, it exhibits a centimeter's worth of UNDERhang. No cueing, and an absolute ergonomic nightmare -- don't even THINK about trying to get the stylus into a lead-in groove if you've had a drink or two. But the finest sounding arm I've ever used. This sucker tracks anything, has incredible dynamics, but is so counter-intuitive in how it goes about the job that it has made me rethink everything I thought I knew about tonearms.
The RS-A1 simply blows away -- with the same cartridge -- my third arm, an SME IIIs with conventional fishing-line-and-weight anti-skating. I've found that this arm sounds its best with minimum anti-skating or with the fishing line thingie removed altogether.
So if the arm does not have a calibrated antiskate device can you imagine how haphazzard the sound quality could be?Twisting a wire might or might not get the bias right, and will it keep the bias right over time, over the entire aspect of the LP?
Flying blind means if you do not have an antiskate mechanism allowing easy to set azimuth, vtf, vta, and bias then you are guessing.
Guessing is not the best way to evaluate gear.
You do not need to be a fanatic about bias to want to have something easy to set and calibrated for times you want to flip back and forth at the same settings.
I am happy so many find success with testing by ear, since the ear should be the final arbitor of the bias setting. They probably don't swap out 4 cartridges or more per day.
How are you liking your Mega plinth? Did it exhibit more bass and midrange detail than the Home Despot plinth?
Unless the cartridges are premounted in a removeable headshell or your tonearm uses the P-mount system. Multiple-armed turntables or multiple turntables would be preferable to me than handling those all-too-delicate transducers aka cartridges :-)
The JMW arm has worked perfectly with every medium mass cart (so far, 6 to 8) I've tried with it.The RS-A1 has no anti-skating provision at all and, from everything I've read, heard, and experienced, it doesn't need one.
There is no real way to "calibrate" anti-skating requirements; skating forces vary all across each record and there is no "one size fits all" solution to this. Best you can do is come close. You can certainly do that with the original JMW.
Not sure what you mean by the last paragraph. Both Lencos I've had sound sensational; the current one mostly differs in allowing for the provision of two arms. Too bad that I need it to handle three :-)
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