What defines a good tonearm

It's a "system" with tradeoffs for any current design. No tonearm does everything perfectly for every cartridge. But that's been said several times already in thie thread.

There are obvious "winners" in the tonearm wars, each with unique characteristics and plenty of reviews to read. These "winners" do tend to be expensive though. The right one will depend on the cartridge being used, which will depend on the phono stage being used and its loading capabilities, and good sound is still not assured unless the turntable and its isolation and the overall setup is addressed properly.

Isn't it fun? No matter how well you manage all the above you will still have doubts about whether it can still be better, or just different. And that's why there is a thriving used market for all of this crap.

Hiho, you can look here: http://www.nizkor.org/features/fallacies/red-herring.html

I've pointed the link to Red Herring but a number of other fallacies are described. I've found the site really helpful over the years as I found myself guilty of some of these. The more I was able to drop them, the easier my conversation has become! The explanations are terse, but its worth wading through.

Dan-ed, I came to the opposite conclusion regarding the Talea. I thought I heard better tracking and a more stable soundstage (similar to tape playback) with the Triplanar. However my exposure to the Talea is limited, and it was not a particular target of my comments. In my eyes it has yet to prove itself but is clearly a contender. I've still got unipivots in the stable...

Interesting. You are the first person who has made such comments that I know of, but I do understand loyalty.

I came to the tentative conclusion that in part I was responding to highly euphonic "imperfections" that I have heard before with unipivots in my own system.

A strange conclusion Lew especially when transposed alongside "the ethereal quality of the Talia" which you heard?
Sounds like you are buying Raul's claim that anything which sounds good must be attributed to 'distortions'?

You Guys kill me..Fighting over flawed(pivoted) tonearms is beyond me...

Where is all the NEW Thinking?! lets see some real R&D and invest some money in some real tonearm engineering...I have seen enough of the pretty wood arms...

Any pivoted arm new or old is flawed from the get go besides being only tangent on 2 points of a record other parts = (distortions)......the mechanical bias on any of these arms are not totally linear/calibrated across the entire record so you have torsions/distortions etc... if that is what you like so be it..

I guess I will just stick with my graphite composite Linear motor...tangent arm.....