The big Japanese outfits like Sony, Yamaha, Marantz, Pioneer, Denon and Kenwood made some extraordinary equipment in their prime which was manufactured to a standard we may never see again and which was the result of serious R&D. I remember having a bit of a Damascene moment many years ago in the early 90's when I compared the fit, finish and build quality of some entry level Japanese gear with high end exotica of the time I was familiar with,never mind the flagship series made by Japanese brands.
I agree. I have Sony PS-X800 and it is a remarkable piece of engineering. Despite being based on what is now 40-year-old technology (the first Biotracer table came out in 1978) there is nothing on the market that is similar at any price.
This arm is the closest I've seen to something like the linear biotracer arm on my PS-X800. It is certainly better in some respects, but I don't think it duplicates all the features it has (electronic tracking, resonance reduction, et cetera). It is also $120,000 or something. The PS-X800 new in 1981 was only the equivalent of $4000 or so.
With today's technology you could probably recreate what Sony did in 1981 much more cheaply. The PS-X800 is a mess of coils, Hall Effect sensors, and ICs. If you were to try recreate its functionality today you could probably do so much more easily. Phones have a plethora sensors which are just off the shelf components. I imagine the myriad of complex ICs that control the whole thing could probably be replaced with a cheap computer running some code. I'm not an engineer or anything so I don't know for sure.
It is probably feasible for someone to make it, but who would buy it? There is no way you could convince most audiophiles to buy such a thing. They'd much rather spend $25,000 on Shindo 301 which uses a drive unit that was designed in roughly 1954. The tonearm doesn't even have anti-skating.
Most audiophiles are hostile to the notion of linear arms in general (I have no idea why). The idea of servo-driven tonearm infuriates them. They claim it is inaccurate because it relies on error to make its adjustments (somewhat, but not totally true). The PS-X800 boasts a tracking error of 0.05° or less (the arm actually moves in sync with the rotation the record and can compensate so that it doesn't need to be in error in order to move) and even my cheap plastic Hitachi HT-L70 claims somewhere around 0.1° of error. Compare this to any pivoting arm. Pivoting arms are only aligned at the two null points (at least that is how most alignment scheme work). At every other point they are in error, and that amount of error is generally much greater than the tracking error on servo arm. It's like comparing a broken clock (exactly right twice-a-day) to a decent mechanical clock which might lose or gain a few seconds over the course of an hour, but tells the time correctly. In the mind of vinyl enthusiasts the former is somehow more preferable to the latter.
Maybe I am just talking nonsense, but that it was it seems like to me. Servo-linear arms do work well (except for maybe the very cheapest tables). My unscientific, "subjective" experience (the only kind of observation that audiophiles seem to accept) tells me they aren't noisy either. I feel like they'd disagree if I said that though, as I've obviously never heard a real "high quality" table, or my system "isn't resolving enough", et cetera.
Sorry. I have a lot of rage. I like this place though.
