TW Acustic 10.5 and Graham Phantom Supreme II

TD, your system is excellent. I bet it is extremely musical. I love my XV-1s cart and really want an arm that will work well with it. I've just heard some experiences with the XV-1s and TW 10.5 arm that simply didn't allow room with the pins to allow proper stylus position (unable to slide cart back on head shell) due to lack of room with pins hitting arm tubing.

I'm encouraged though by your experience and upgrade path which would be similar to mine if I take that course. Thanks do much for sharing your info and experience.

The Cardas pins used are very long on the TW 10.5. I think it can be ordered with shorter pins. I have a big cartridge but no issue with the pins. But I know who does and understand why. I just bent the pins a touch but I would order with different pins. Mind you the long pins make it easy to swap cartridges in some ways

I have not heard Graham with TW Raven AC-1 but heard Raven 10.5 and went with Reed 3Q 12 inch instead. Both are excellent, Raven may be a bit more neutral, a bit less personality, does not seem to add and subtract anything much. However it does not match well with my Koetsu at all and in fact TW Acoustic seems to rather dislike Koetsu and discourage me from using Koetsu from email I received.
With Koetsu's spec, I guess medium mass arm is not going work very well anyhow. So I went with Reed arm with Cocobolo arm which works well with both of my cartridge, Air Tight and Koetsu. In comparison, the sound is a bit warmer, rounder, a touch smoother than Raven 10.5

Normally it is no difficult decision. I am in Tonearms for about 12 years (the better ones you can see in my System, those which didn't survive a week are not listed) and in all those years every Manufacturer/Distributor told me, that his new Design beats a Graham easily. They "compared" and know from what they talk. The world is black or white. I did those comparisons, too and i got some very interesting results. Indeed, mostly the differences were not subtle, they are huge (are, because nothing changed). A correct geometry, the ability to adjust a cartridge correctly in 3 minutes, a correct tonal reproduction, expensive material for superior vibration transfer, a real high quality bearing, expensive material which ruin the tools pretty fast...all this can create confusion. Especially when the Arm is one of those, which can show exactly what kind of quality the Turntable or the Phonostage is.
All this can create a kind of "taste" which can confuse. Too much detail, no softness, some nice distortions compensated with a matching cartridge is an alternative to find the right product. The market does offer those..
For those the Phantom is not the right choice.

I have both Raven 10.5 and Graham Phantom II (upgraded from I, might further upgrade to Supreme) mounted on Raven Two TT. Still not get to the point to offer any valid comparison on the sound between the 2 arms. But I will offer some of my observations and I think it's helpful.

Installed Raven 10.5 about 4 months ago. Upon fine adjustment of the arm, noticed an issue with Anti-skating, and the arm also skip quite often when lowering onto the LP. I thought my table might lose level, but it's not.

Just mounted Graham Phantom II in the past few days.

When put two arms side by side, I found Phantom is easy to setup especially on the pivot to spindle distance. Phantom also has measurable/repeatable settings for VTA, Azimuth and Anti-Skate. In comparison, VTA on Raven 10.5 is fine, but Azimuth is tough, anti-skate is kind of joke at least as of now.

Phantom offers a plastic spindle cap. There is a hole on the head shell that will fit in the tip of the cap, which will help greatly to setup the distance between pivot and spindle.

The paper scale provided by Raven 10.5 is very hard to use to setup the required 251.2mm distance. I set it up before inserted the Raven arm in the armboard. While mounting the phantom, I happened to notice there is also a hole on the Raven 10.5 head shell, in very similar position as the phantom's. After removing cartridge from Raven 10.5, I tried to measure the distance again from the tip of the Phantom cap to the Raven Bird, I found my original distance is short by 2mm or so. After adjust the distance of Raven 10.5 to let the Raven 10.5 head shell hole sit on the Phantom spindle cap (not quite fit in), I found the distance is quite close to required 251.2mm. Very interesting, I am quite happy that upon installing Phantom, I also solved a problem to setup Raven 10.5 without investing more tools offered by Uni-something or Feickert.