Tttt, sorry you are wrong. And so are your assumption of me "connive" at your comparing "similar design" tonearms.
I took the price tag as a call for quality and excellence - you took it as a qualifier.
Of course TW established a brand - this is his one and so far only remarkable contribution to the audio world.
But a brand isn't automatically leading to - nor defining - quality.
But maybe me concept of "quality" hasn't kept up with modern day view.
Just as a reminder - quality in its original sense of the word means neither "presence" nor "price tag" nor "brand".
It means quality - nothing else.
"Brand" BTW, isn't the same either as it used to be in the days before the foremost attention of all managers focussed on shareholder-value and the next quarterly report.
Brand today is as hollow as most marketing action.
And I studied marketing and graduated in.
A terrible business.
In your opinion no closer looking may be possible, - but it is.
Guess we both will agree, that it will make a hell of a difference whether Michael Schumacher drives a Formula 1 car or you take driver's seat.
Aside from the fact that he may be a bit faster than you, he furthermore will be able to tell the technicians some important information after the ride. How the car behaves in certain situations, where there might be some room for improvement - etc.
He will gather all that information and detect tiny details while driving his rounds. In the very same situation you might have a hard struggle keeping the F-1 car on the track at all and might be forced to focus all your senses on surviving the ride. In addition, you may not have too much knowledge to start with about Formula 1 racing car design (which indeed is one world more complex and demanding than audio design as a whole - let alone tonearm design).
When he and you stand in front of the F-1 car, just glancing at it, he most likely will see much more than you too. He too already might have a good idea about how the car might behave and how to drive it.
See the point ?
Of course this discussion doesn't "lead to a reasonable result".
It can't.
The position of the TW 10.5 isn't backed by any technical support - despite the fact that we had a lot of posts by its co-designer himself and his dear friend from the southern caribbean. But all these posts did not contain a single technical input, but concentrated on my person.
As said before - I am still waiting for technical facts to give the tonearm in question some good reason for its claim of superiority ... and its price tag.
