Mynamemynaim
38yrs a Naim owner
If you have to ask.......
Is this the best tonearm in the world?
- Thread starter GT
- Start date
Tony L
Administrator
Yes, that would be fascinating. To my mind so much post-1980 thinking is kind of a child’s eye view of ‘rigidity’, i.e. the assumption that because something looks and feels “strong” in the hand that has any relevance to its behaviour at audio frequencies with the tiny forces and specific feedback loops in play. I suspect many tonearms have far more in common with a tuning fork or ruler flicked on a school desk than representing any logical solution to the requirement. The lateral thinking of say the Well Tempered arm or Frank Schroeder’s wood tube and magnetic bearing are far more interesting. The Dynavector idea of completely separating vertical and lateral mass/compliance is fascinating too, one I’ve nearly bought before now out of pure curiosity! In comparison to these designs far too much of the current market just looks like increasingly Veblen ways of making a Linn Basic Plus. It is remarkably uninteresting.
sonddek
Trade: SUPATRAC
Yes - thanks for the correction - me being lazy.
Joe
pfm Member
I do.
His Reference arm runs at around £7,500 so I would imagine it is double that.
sonddek
Trade: SUPATRAC
I had assumed that cranes were truss structures because of wind and that tubes have higher strength-to-weight since the load bearing material is more evenly distributed. Skeletons, which require stiffness and lightness, are tubular. Truss structures only seem to appear in bones when flexions is required. Tone-arms shouldn't flex. I understand that Continuum used some quite fancy computer analysis in the design of the Cobra, which is a tube with internal stiff foam. My suspicion is that if you melted down an aluminium truss arm and made a thin-walled tube of the same length, it would be much stiffer. It might want damping to control ringing though.
I agree. But at least the Well Tempered arm bearing's freedom to move in the t axis is limited to deep infrasound.
To Be Honest the Arm is Fuggly and the Deck is not suitable for a domestic environment. The "scaffolding" look is not particularly practical and more of a dust trap than anything else. I'm happy to leave the deck with the arm in the dealer Demonstration room.
To my ears (and eyes) some of the best (and most neutral) arms are seriously overlooked and greatly under rated. Roy Gandy's RB250 is a stellar arm at the price point. Light weight, rigid and to make it in a one-piece die-casting is a major engineering achievement. Then to do it at the price he is asking only makes it even more impressive. The Other reference arm I would offer as a benchmark item is the SME series V, uber rigid, no real sound of its own and very flexible with adjustments for every parameter under the sun. Both these arms are rigid, neutral and offer the best platform for Both moving magnets and Moving Coils, whatever your taste. A tapered tube will offer the most rigid beam for the function of a tonearm. The 3D printed scaffolding is overkill and has probably more resonant modes than a lightly damped tapered tube.
LPSpinner.
To my ears (and eyes) some of the best (and most neutral) arms are seriously overlooked and greatly under rated. Roy Gandy's RB250 is a stellar arm at the price point. Light weight, rigid and to make it in a one-piece die-casting is a major engineering achievement. Then to do it at the price he is asking only makes it even more impressive. The Other reference arm I would offer as a benchmark item is the SME series V, uber rigid, no real sound of its own and very flexible with adjustments for every parameter under the sun. Both these arms are rigid, neutral and offer the best platform for Both moving magnets and Moving Coils, whatever your taste. A tapered tube will offer the most rigid beam for the function of a tonearm. The 3D printed scaffolding is overkill and has probably more resonant modes than a lightly damped tapered tube.
LPSpinner.
Joe
pfm Member
best not step out into the countryside then. It's a dangerous place out there
Y'know ?...I've thought about this post for hours...still can't grasp its meaning.
Man that’s ugly. Definitely inspired by the Guggenheim museum in NYC.
Note the tone arm looming in the background.
It's what they call marketing, as you will never forget it. All of OMA products are like this. Enough people have reported how good OMA products sound and I for one would love to hear one of their systems. Their approach reminds me of Yamamura Churchill...
a.palfreyman
pfm Member
Trouble is, the wall would be so thin that it probably wouldn't be practical as it would easily crush.
But the deck doesn't look good anyway IMHO.
It's Caledonian MacBrayne meets Starship Enterprise...
Having introduced Frank Schröder's tonearms into the UK over 20 years ago and sold quite a few, but that was before the long waiting lists appeared, but I do know how good they are. I have personally owned his Model 1, Model 2, DPS and two Reference SQ tonearms (Snakewood and Jacaranda) and all of Frank's tonearms are excellent, so I have no doubt the OMA tonearm will be very special...
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Tony L
Administrator
I suspect you’ll actually find both far more stable and less resonant than ball-races. If you think about ball race bearings they have to have ‘play’/slop to move freely. If they don’t have any play they can’t move at all. The one thing you can safely say about every ball-race on the planet is there is some slop in it unless it has rusted solid! The play in question can be very small in very high tolerance bearing units, but it is certainly there. It has to be. Now picture that play in any arm with a ball-race as a vertical bearing. The weight of the arm is loading the ball-races in an uneven manner, it is effectively sitting on the bottom couple of balls. This is not good. Certainly nowhere near as conceptually solid vibration-free mount as a unipivot, knife-edge, WT’s pot of gloop etc. The Kuzma ‘four-point’ bearing is an interesting design that addresses this in a new way too. Worth googling-up pictures.
This isn’t to say there aren’t many great arms with ball-race bearings. There clearly are. There is far more to making a good arm than bearing type. Based on which arms are well liked and stay the distance I suspect much of that may be counter-intuitive too.
I’d love to see some proper scientific research into this as it is a genuinely fascinating area, e.g. computer modelling of vibration modes, accelerometer data, the effects of damping, the many differing approaches to mounting an arm onto various surfaces etc. I have my hunches based on decades of subjective listening, learning and tweaking (hence my view too many arms behave as tuning forks or twanged rulers on school desks). There are a lot of very interesting sub-topics here. It is a complex system with many variables and no clear answers to my mind, but I’d still like to see some proper NASA-grade data rather than the usual marketing guff.
a.palfreyman
pfm Member
...and because a ball roller bearing is designed to rotate rather than sit in a (relatively) fix position it will tend to wear/fret causing chatter and microscopic flat spots when asked to operate in that way...but they clearly work.
Goodness, there is so much lack of understand of basic structures being guffed here. The usual confusion between strength and stiffness, suggesting a tube is good wrt to stiffness to weight in a bending case compared to other shapes, etc. Some basic reading would help some - this is particularly good example of the genre :-
I don't know whether to get angry or just laugh; best do the latter.
CHE
PS Oh, and if something 'doesn't flex' you have infinite stress when you apply load. Q: is that a good thing ?
I don't know whether to get angry or just laugh; best do the latter.
CHE
PS Oh, and if something 'doesn't flex' you have infinite stress when you apply load. Q: is that a good thing ?
Mike Reed
pfm Member
Especially if I lived in the Dartford, Kent area, I'd be worried to come down in the morning to find Extinction Rebellion strapped to that arm.
Received wisdom, I know, but the 250, universally applauded as it was, is not a good choice for most m/coils (I believe the RB300 was better, however). Having had a Five for 13+ years, I found it a curate's egg. The VTA adjustment was fallible and time-consuming; sonically it was so neutral to be anodyne and even the sled device needed too many bolt adjustments. Was never convinced by the bias accuracy either. In its favour, though, and at a lightweight 11g eff. mass, it was quite versatile with cart's, even managing a Koetsu (Blk Goldline, admittedly). In the early nineties, it was avant garde (and priced accordingly) but not so sure it offers as much today, and esp. the at the hiked price etc.)
The Five-twelve is only 1 g more mass (quite an achievement for an extra 3") and looks the bus., but there are better value arms out there in this length, both unipivot and gimballed.
Received wisdom, I know, but the 250, universally applauded as it was, is not a good choice for most m/coils (I believe the RB300 was better, however). Having had a Five for 13+ years, I found it a curate's egg. The VTA adjustment was fallible and time-consuming; sonically it was so neutral to be anodyne and even the sled device needed too many bolt adjustments. Was never convinced by the bias accuracy either. In its favour, though, and at a lightweight 11g eff. mass, it was quite versatile with cart's, even managing a Koetsu (Blk Goldline, admittedly). In the early nineties, it was avant garde (and priced accordingly) but not so sure it offers as much today, and esp. the at the hiked price etc.)
The Five-twelve is only 1 g more mass (quite an achievement for an extra 3") and looks the bus., but there are better value arms out there in this length, both unipivot and gimballed.
per-Sony-fied
Me in another jacket
Man that’s ugly. Definitely inspired by the Guggenheim museum in NYC.
Note the tone arm looming in the background.
Being out in the cold, not a good choice..... the spindle has sprouted some growth.
Nero
Re: Tired
Even if you’re close, it’s a lot of money. I can’t help feeling that the money would be better spent in developing a parallel tracker, where the arm is about 10mm long. At least you’d get rid of the tracking error, which remains non-insignificant with any other arm type, no matter how expensive.