……….. The problem with the Hadcock is that once the rubber on the counterweight goes, it's almost impossible to get it to stay in place...………………….,
I have not checked, and I am not about to drag the rubbers out to check, in case they aren't, but I would be VERY surprised if they were not standard O rings. If they are, removal of the old would be ten times the challenge of fitting new, but should be simple enough.
The ARO is such a clean minimalistic design. Beautiful. I love mine!
The infernal infinitely adjustable cueing system apart, I would say that a Hadcock is no less clean and minimalist than the ARO, in fact I would suggest that a Hadcock is more so. An ARO is, relatively, a chunky industrial thing, compare to the slender, small-scale construction of a Hadcock - Hadcocks don't even have the side peg for azimuth adjustment, just an eccentric counter-weight.
………………….. The counterweight also sits far from the bearing with my Adikt. I would like to try the Tiger Paw sKale to see if that fixes these problems....
If anyone can come up with some maths that provides an explanation as to why a heavy counter-weight, nearer the pivot, is an advantage, that'll be the first that I have seen. I asked about this before and I all I got was complete nonsense that proved the contrary when it was worked through. Heavier counter-weights are another fad.
They will, inevitably, be somewhat more of a faff to adjust (greater change in balance conditions with the same movement along the peg - the lever effect is mass x linear distance from fulcrum/pivot), but once set, so long as things don't drift, that hardly matters.
Increasing the counter-weight mass decreases the tonearm moment of inertia (aka effective mass) as moment of inertia is proportional to mass and distance SQUARED - take a crazy example, increase the mass two-fold, you halve the displacement from the fulcum, so you have half the moment of inertia for the counter-weight alone (which is just part of the effective mass of the tonearm). The lower the inertia/effective mass, the more "bouncey" the tonearm - all else equal, it will affect tracking, quite possibly tracking less well, especially if you assume that the original designer(s) knew what they were doing....