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Goldmund Studio - still relevant today?

In today high-end world (very small, and shrinking every day), is Goldmund Studio still relevant? Is it's performance still on par with similarly priced tables, or is it a dinosaur? Is it's value still in performance, or is it mainly a collector's item? What do you guys think? I refer to late models with all-acrylic body, and JVC motor, and T3F arm, which actually work, not the early ones, which seemed to have a mind on their own :-)) They normally command at least $2500 on used market, up to $4000 for perfect examples.
markshvarts
cabbiendi
10 posts
 
I am still amazed after 20+ years to see how misunderstood the T3F was. It is an arm of stunning performance, utterly easy to set-up, fully reliable and certainly does nothing bad to the cantilevers only to extract all the music out of the LP's. It works silky smooth with the PL8.
I had the s/n 2020 from 1988 to 2013 on the Reference s/n 2069, never ever a problem, never a broken cantilever.
Of course, as any high performance audio item it had to be optimazed. Problem was Goldmund's greed for cosmetics over technical matter. The problem is so easy to see and yet no user or seller has ever talked about the issue.
Some idio... inside Goldmund decided to place the CW too close to the bearings to keep it hided inside the bridge.
Thus the arm/CW, as such, had no leverage at all. Consequently CW mass must be increased to a crazy 200gr for a 10gr cartridge. This is already a compromise for a pivoted arm but is catastrophic for a tangential. The aluminum/ceramic strip headshell did not help either. What I did, I first replaced the aluminum headshell for a CNC strip made of treated ebony, this reduced the mass at the very tip of the arm by 5gr. Then the most important, I CNC a hard-resin prolongation-insert that was attached to the back of the arm that allowed to set a lighter CW farther away of the bearings. The result is the use of a CW of only 45gr., the option to use the level of damping fluid you wish and a terrific, amazing improve in performance.
I do not know how to upload pictures but I can provide tech. drawings if someone is interested.
You can go to Hammertone Audio (turntable section) to see some pics/explanation. That is (was) my system. Additionally Mr. A. Salvatore understood the problem and posted my explanation in his web-site.
IMO none of the fellows that have always criticized this arm have a tonearm better than a poperly set-up T3F.
To be noted this arm as today has little tech. support and if something happens to the E-Prom or the Zilog CPU it will be difficult to fix.

Regards,
lewm
6,770 posts
 
Dear Cabbiendi, Can you say why you think the elongated mount for the CW effects an improvement in sound, apart from the fact that it permits use of a lighter counter-wt. There are two parameters (at least) that would change with this mod: (1) lateral effective mass, and (2) vertical effective mass. IMO, the reduction in lateral effective mass is probably good, and may explain why you've had no problems with cartridge damage. But the vertical effective mass may well have increased with this mod, since the effective mass is a function of the square of the distance from the center of gravity of the CW to the pivot but only a first order function of the mass of the CW. Thus if you've moved the CW 4X its normal distance from the pivot, which is probably close to correct, since you were able to reduce the mass of the CW from 200 to 45 (roughly 4 to 1), that would increase effective mass by 4-fold (16X for the fold difference in CW to pivot distance times 1/4 for the reduction in weight). That might be bad for all but low compliance cartridges. Perhaps that's what you use.
cabbiendi
10 posts
 
Dear Lewm,
I understand what you mean however, correct that your estimation seems to be it did not reproduce in practice. Indeed if you go and make a google search you will see that "all" air bearing tomearms (Air-Tangent, Rockport's, AirLine, etc) invariably use a very low-mass CW very far away from the bearing, further back to what I set in the T3F. Since I'm not an Eng. before to make that chages I put in contact with Lyra, I was using a Titan-i on the T3F and res-freq was in the order of 4.5Hz, since I use EQ-H-Frame subs the woofers were botoming even having 52mm X-max.
BTW, I did not move the new CW X4 to the normal distance, I gues it was less than double. Please note the massive reduction of mass at the tip of the arm, changing HS material (from AL or ceramic = std Goldmund) to Ebony.
I first had the intention to reduce size of the CW and put it even closer to the bearings using a CW made of Tungsten (I found in China a bar that has 20gr/cm3 density).
Reason was the T3F cinematic is not really tangential but moves in arcs of 2-3o at a time, I was convinced that it would behave like a pivoted arm rather than tangential (high mass CW closer to the pivot VS low-mass CW far away from pivot for tagentials). The head of Lyra asked me to wait a little he was going to contact Mr. Carr. Finally he came to me and confirmed that "due to the many forces" the T3F must be considered as a tangential tonearm. I then went and prepared the stuff to modify the arm according to this. Mr. Carr could not be more correct. With the new CW system the res-freq went up to 10Hz.
Do you have an idea Lewm what this mean ? can you imagine a 200gr mass so close crushing the bearings ?
It was not how the arm moves that made Syntax reach his conclusions about T3F it was this idiotic massive CW so close to the bearins.
Then we have the damping fluid, normally a std. T3F needs more DF than normal to perform decently, after the mods in the CW you can use the quantity you wish, the improvements in HF are nothing short of a miracle. I read about negative effects of too much DF in a tonearm paper from VdH.

Regarding Studio suspension it is well known (from at least two decades) that it performs much better with its suspension defeated.

===========

Anyway Lewm, T3F and the Goldmund Reference are now gone unfortunately. I'm a personal follower of your (and Halcro's system BTW) I'm now in the hunt of a P3 or a L-07D my prefer DD TT.

Regards,
sfischer1's avatar
sfischer1
30 posts
 

I picked up a Studio/T3F, with Transfiguration Temper, used a few years ago, for about $2000, in good cosmetic condition, with boxes and accessories, and found that I liked it much more than the Luxman 444/SME V/Cardas combination. (The Luxman was much more beautifully finished.) Recently, I began to focus on my record collection, and I updated the Temper to a new Ortofon Cadenza Black. I carefully setup the T3F, including the use of a USB microscope for checking/setting the VTA.

The VTA is a pain to set, first requiring that the platter (at stylus contact point) be level in both axes, and then that the arm "box" be level in both axes. Adjusting the arm VTA requires the unlocking and dialing of 4 corner "pillar" screws, maintaining the level of the arm in both axes. Tedious but doable. Forget about changing VTA on the fly.

Adjusting the VTF is also tedious since this is done by unlocking the counterweight setscrew and then moving the weight and relocking the setscrew which is somewhat obscured by the arm structure. The setscrew should only be unlocked enough to allow the movement of the weight while still under friction.

I’ve seen comments about the horizontal mass of the arm posing a problem for the cantilever. For typical tangential arms, this might be a problem since the whole arm structure must be pulled horizontally across. I don’t believe this applies to the T3F since for a small angle, the arm pivots horizontally like a normal pivoted arm. The sensor detects any error and a motor, not the stylus, moves the mass of the arm horizontally. It seems that a position change occurs once every 1.5 to 2 seconds or one groove spacing. Hardly enough to produce any significant tracking error. The one weakness here is that the correction is applied in one direction only. Eccentric records will not allow the arm to move alternately in and out. Luckily the amount of horizontal pivot in the arm will typically absorb the eccentricity without any unusual stress on the cantilever.

Another conceptual concern, if not practical, is that the arm drive motor is activated for a tiny fraction of a second every 1.5 to 2 seconds. This might generate some mechanical noise but I haven’t been able to detect it while listening, except at the label end grooves while spiraling in and just before arm pickup.

I have noted some logic bugs, when operating the cueing and inward/outward buttons, in rapid succession, and then issueing a stop command, the arm may fail to raise up before returning to the rest position. You should be aware of this and ready to intervene by lifting the arm manually.

I think this setup sounds spectacular and am very pleased with it. I really don’t know what I would want instead of it.

sfischer1's avatar
sfischer1
30 posts
 
Regarding the modifications which use a lighter counterweight at a further distance: Isn't the effective mass of the arm increased by moving a counterweight further from the pivot? The effective mass has to do with the product of the mass of the weight and its' distance from the rotational pivot. Depending on the cartridge used, this may not be a good change.
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