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Yummy Yammy

The non-offset arm just triggers me. The tracking error has to be horrendous, surely? I can understand DJs liking it for back-cueing, but on a high-end audiophile deck? Other than that I bet it’s an amazing deck. I’d love to hear a credible maths/science justification for the arm though.
 
An image from the linked article:

44-yk-edit2.jpg


Oh, and:

iu
 
Beautiful, but not even direct drive?

Disappointing, to say the least.

All nostalgia tinted. Clever marketing that is.
 
It’s a chunky thing. I love Yamaha and it’s aesthetics but not sure I’d look at alternatives before this.
 
The non-offset arm just triggers me. The tracking error has to be horrendous, surely? I can understand DJs liking it for back-cueing, but on a high-end audiophile deck? Other than that I bet it’s an amazing deck. I’d love to hear a credible maths/science justification for the arm though.

I know what you mean, Tony – it just looks wrong to me, too! However, the concept has a bit of history and was actually first brought out by Yamaha themselves in the early 1980s when one of the upgrade arms they offered for their GT-2000 turntable was the YSA-2, which was straight and had specifications almost identical to that of the new GT-5000 arm. You can see it on the Vintage Knob's GT-2000x page here: http://www.thevintageknob.org/yamaha-GT-2000x.html

I’ve done a fair bit of research into the whole idea and it does appear that it was mainly a Japanese thing – there was some design justification for the concept in the YSA-2’s manual but this was only ever printed in Japanese. I did ask Yamaha about an English translation of it when I reviewed the GT-5000 but one never appeared. In addition to Yamaha, Micro Seiki and Stax also briefly offered underhung, straight versions of their normal arms, so Yamaha weren’t ploughing a lone furrow. Equally, Viv Labs and Fidelix are still pursuing the idea today along with Yamaha (all Japanese manufacturers - what do they know that they’re not telling us?!)

For what it’s worth, when I questioned Yamaha about it, their theory was that the distortion arising from an unbalanced arm supporting a stylus that is tracking the groove is less subjectively problematic than the distortion caused by tracking error. To naturally balance the arm in this way it needs to be perfectly straight, laterally symmetrical and have no bias compensation, which is exactly what they’ve done. I have an engineering background and, like you, I’d like to see some engineering justification (that isn’t in Japanese!) and certainly the distortion measurements that Hi-Fi News made across the width of an LP did show some relatively high numbers.

Unfortunately, there’s one problem with all this – the GT-5000 sounded utterly sublime and had some of the sweetest and cleanest treble I’ve heard from any turntable for a long time. With my regular Clearaudio MC Essence (MicroLine stylus), there was no distortion, no mis-tracking and no curls of vinyl spewing off any of my records as it mangled the grooves. Frankly, the experience was convincing enough for me to start looking for an original YSA-2 arm to go on my own GT-2000 - it appears they're rare and popular, though, so I'm on a waiting list.
 


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