I, too, opine that the optimum recipe for record playback is high compliance, low mass, judicious damping at the arm pivot, and the importance of synergy of the complete record playback system rather than the advanced strength of an individual component. To achieve that end for myself I assembled a combination of commercially available audio equipment plus modification of same and construction of my own components.
My first venture into the mega high compliance and low VTF world was the purchase of an ADC XLM which was very high compliance and spec’d at 0.6g VTF, +/- 0g. It worked well in a Decca low mass viscous damped unipivot arm that I had at the time but the ‘system’ was very sensitive to the slightest disturbance from floor-born vibrations and the stylus actually jumped the groove on a cymbal crash at a certain spot on one LP, no matter what I did in the way of adjustments. Long story short, the playback system I eventually put together that addressed these issues with great success was a mostly stock Thorens TD-125, a Rabco SL8E linear tracking arm to which I retrofit a very low mass viscous damped unipivot arm of my own design, and perched the turntable atop a DIY seismic platform that was tuned to around 1Hz in both vertical and lateral movement (sort of a poor man’s version of a Minus K platform).
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The platform was spring loaded in the vertical direction via linear ball bushings (think MacPherson strut suspension) and in the horizontal direction by sandwiching a slab of foam rubber in the base of the pedestal. The horizontal motion was small enough that, combined with the length of the pedestal, there was no objectionable pitch or roll to disturb the arm. There was no ‘stiction’ at all in the horizontal direction and whatever minute bearing ‘stiction’ there might have been in the vertical direction was filtered out by the stock spring suspension of the TD-125. The suppression of floor-born vibration by the seismic platform was so effective that I could jump on the floor in front of the turntable with hardly any audible disturbance.
I designed and built the arm as a very low mass, low friction viscous damped unipivot. The unipivot / linear tracker combination sailed through the previously mentioned cymbal crash without a whimper. IMO the cymbal crash likely caused a transient increase in stylus drag which resolved into a skating force transient that excited the mass/compliance resonance in a way that added enough side force to derail the stylus. My next cartridge after the XLM was a B&O MMC-6000 with beryllium cantilever and nude line contact stylus.
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IME I would add that optimal tracking also requires that the arm geometry not impose added side force from skating effects. At the risk of starting a flame war, I suggest that this requirement is best satisfied by active servo linear tracking designs. I say ‘active servo linear’ because passive linear arms invariably add side force to the cantilever from the stiction/friction of multiple rolling bearings. When playing an off-center record, a head-on view of the stylus on a passive linear arm often shows visible cantilever deflection caused by the stiction/friction of the bearings and track surface. Even a small cantilever deflection causes angular tracking error, which is self-defeating for a ‘linear tracking’ arm.
The carriage mechanics on my arm has since been upgraded with an improved cueing system and a photoelectric servo control that drives the carriage motor in a continuous variable speed mode that follows the groove pitch smoothly, and no longer exhibits any of the on-off “crabbing” that the stock SL8E is/was infamous for.
My generalized observation is that the golden age of super-tracking ended with the advent of the CD, when most manufacturers of high compliance cartridges and arms designed for them closed shop. After 45 years of my unipivot linear tracker as my main arm, I am currently designing a new version which will reluctantly be higher mass, in order to be more compatible with the established trend of cartridge manufacturers towards medium and low compliance suspensions - IMO a trend that went in the wrong direction.