Thales Simplicity tonearm review in Stereophile.

01-12-14: Proftournesol: "Apparently the US agent 'adjusted' every arm that he received and the bearings were then malfunctioning."

I wonder if this is the case in a review from a French magazine as the headshell is installed completely wrong; it's reversed! The funny part is that it got a glowing review!* That's just unbelievable! I wonder if their local distributor re-installed the headshell mounting plate and had it backward!

Check out the pictures:

Page 1 - - - - - - Page 2 - - - - - - Page 3 - - - - - - Page 4

If the sonic impression was based on the performance of the arm in the pictures, it would've had ton of tracking errors and distortions.

* (I don't read French but used Google Translate to get the gist of the review.)

_______

Yes, the French review photo has the headshell mounted back to front! Maybe it's better for playing records backwards and deciphering hidden lyrics?

Yeah, the alignment would be way off. On the other hand, if you could make up for that, by changing the P2S distance on a table with a pivoting arm board. Having the headshell backward would allow you to get to the cartridge screws, and you would be able to adjust alignment like a normal arm. Instead of using that funky alignment jig it comes with. Unless having the headshell plate backwards would throw it's geometry off. Which it probably would.

The Simplicity is an articulated tonearm so its geometry has to be exact to work as intended. The stylus has to be exactly below the pivot (on the left armwand bearing) on the headshell in order to be tangential tracking. Any misalignment will throw everything out of wack. It's not supposed to have overhang but the wrong headshell installation push the stylus about an inch forward so it creates overhang and would throw off everything. You cannot treat it like a normal arm because the headshell pivots and the armbase also has two pivot points which makes it a tetragonal geometry.

PS. I alerted this to Thales and the designer replied back saying the mistake was corrected before the sonic review but the photos were taken already so they printed it as he said "it's the French way of life..." A funny dig on c'est la vie!

_______

With this headshell adjustment there is no right geometry and it's impossible to get any kind of good results.

Amazing this Thales controversy!