Anti-skate

I believe the "i"(Larry) has it.

It's worth mentioning that the anti skate scale on some older arms are marked to differentiate between the stylus drag of conical and eliptical stylus profiles. It is interesting to me in the light of some of the comments above and elswhere that when I use a test record similar to the one mentioned above that a high anti-skate force is often required to even out the mistracking distortion between the cahnnels as instructed.

A'feil makes an often overlooked point and underscores the reason that 45s sound so good.

Audiofeil raised an interesting point about the effective velocity being reduced for the inner groove. When I said earlier that there was no obvious reason why skating force should be different for the inner groove, I did not consider the change in velocity. This is obviously a big difference between inner and outer grooves (funny how things are so obvious once someone else thinks it up).

But, I am less certain about whether the lower inner groove velocity would increase or decrease skating force.

From my own experience, whenever I found asymmetric distortion (one channel more than the other) when playing the inner groove, it has lead me to decrease antiskating. While this suggests that skating forces are lower for the inner groove, it could also be the case that my arm does not apply the same force at all positions and has simply increased antiskating too much for the inner groove position. Greater minds are needed here.

My Moerch DP6 has a string on a spring kind of anti-skate mechanism that is progressive in nature. It pulls on a point attached to the base of the tonearm, so that the force exerted increases as the tonearm base pivots and the arm moves more toward the center.

Basically I've found that setting the anti skate so that that the needle falls exactly in the same groove when raised and lowered again (using an outer groove) sets it pretty much perfectly to my ears. There is virtually no anti skate on the outer groove and a bit more on the inner groove as the tonearm pivots and the anti-skate string/spring is pulled taughter.

Don't know if this is any use to anyone, but I thought I'd share.

Bob

SonofJim...Yup, when I removed the whole device, the sound really popped. I suspect that there is a resonance from the gizmo, like (all?) others which is why Harry doesn't like the devices at all. Never the less...if you find no anti-skate to your liking, (I know it's a pain), but remove it and listen...you can always replace it again.