Tonearms with no anti-skate adjustment

Peter Lederman of Soundsmilth has looked at a lot more cartridges under a microscope than I have. He has said that no anti-skate, or incorrectly adjusted anti-skate causes visible wear that is uneven on stylii.

Then again, that arm was designed for low compliance cartridges tracking at high tracking forces, so if your conical Denon 103, or 102, is tracking at 2.5-3 grams the cartridge will probably wear out quickly enough to not make this an issue at all, the conical stylus being particularly well suited to being used without compensation.

If you hear a bit of mistraking add a tiny more VTF. (you can do that by slightly lowering the tail end).

stringreen

If you hear a bit of mistraking add a tiny more VTF. (you can do that by slightly lowering the tail end).

Are you confusing VTF with VTA?

Lowering the arm with reduce either one, so I think you're mistaken.

Thanks for all the input.  It sounds perfectly fine to me...no mistracking, no imbalance in the channels, no distortion that I've noticed.  But I should do some comparison listening tests in highly-modulated tracks using one of my other turntables, and see if I notice distortion in the left channel.

The Grace 704/714 tonearms did not come with anti-skate, so no parts are missing.  They are low-mass arms (6g from what I've researched), and stock pictures of them had F9s mounted, so I really think they are meant for high-compliance cartridges. @viridian Where did you see that they were designed for low-compliance?

@cleeds I saw as well how older VPI arms did not have anti-skate, and were also uni-pivots.  But Lederman notes in his anti-skate article (on SoundSmith's website) that VPI eventually added AS adjustment, probably at the behest of users.

Anti-skate is very important. I would stay away from cheap tobearms which omit this feature.