Why Every “Zero Compromise” Tonearm Involves a Trade-Off

Few phrases appear more often in Hi-Fi marketing than “no compromise.” It is commonly attached to tonearms designed for zero tracking error and perfect groove tangency. It’s certainly an appealing prospect, but it is incomplete, and often, ‘no compromise’ in one specific design issue simply creates problems elsewhere.

We’ve been designing tonearms for more than 30 years, with many lessons learned the hard way during development. Almost every design solution has a form of compromise. The knack is to compromise as little as possible and to sacrifice the least amount of rigidity and pivot freedom. Tonearm designs that attempt zero tracking error are to be applauded for their innovative engineering, but often this pursuit comes with greater compromises in the fundamentals than conventional pivoted tonearms. The following is an account of where those compromises arise and why they cannot be avoided.

What Is Tracking Error?

Tracking error is the lateral angular deviation between the stylus and a straight line running along the radius of the record groove. To understand why it occurs, it helps to consider how a record is produced.

When a record is cut, the cutterhead of the lathe travels along a lead screw or linear rail in a straight line across the lacquer, moving from the outer edge towards the centre while cutting the groove by vibrating horizontally and vertically in response to an analogue stereo input. A pressing is subsequently made from that lacquer. The essential point here is that the cutting head creating the groove moves in a straight line.

Most tonearms do not. Setting aside linear and tangential trackers, at least 95% of arms on the market are pivoted. Because pivoted arms rotate around a fixed point, the cartridge and its stylus move across the record in an arc. An arc cannot remain perfectly perpendicular to a groove that was cut in a straight line, so for the majority of the record, the stylus sits at a slight angle to the groove rather than at the ideal right angle.

The consequence is audible (though admittedly often less audible than other issues). When the stylus is not square to the groove, its contact points on the groove walls shift, introducing minute phase errors between the channels. In practice, this presents as a slight loss of clarity and reduced separation between instruments.

Overhang, Null Points and the Offset Angle

The objective for most arms, then, is to make the best of an arc. This is why cartridge alignment geometries exist – to try and get the least distortion possible from an arcing motion.  The foundational work here is attributed to Wilson, who established that by extending the stylus slightly beyond the spindle you could lower distortion. This distance is known as overhang, and allows the arc to be made perfectly tangent to the groove at two points on the record. These are the null points: the two radii at which tracking error falls to zero.

Outside of those two null points, some error remains. The established alignment geometries are Baerwald (also termed Löfgren A), Löfgren B, and Stevenson, the latter used by both Rega and Technics. These main geometries differ principally in the positions of those two null points. Placing them further inward (Stevenson) improves inner-groove performance at the end of a record’s side; placing them further outward (Baerwald and Löfgren) favours the outer and middle grooves. None of these geometries removes tracking error; each redistributes it.

A further requirement follows. For the stylus to sit genuinely square to the groove at the null points, the cartridge must be angled inward relative to the arm tube. This is the offset angle, typically around 23 degrees on a nine-inch arm. Two relationships are worth noting: a longer arm requires less overhang and a smaller offset angle, because its wider arc more closely approximates a straight line; these both reduce the magnitude of the next issue to consider…

Skating Force

It is widely assumed that a pivoted arm tends to swing outward as the stylus tracks towards the centre. The opposite is actually true.

Because the cartridge is angled with an offset in order to reduce tracking error, the frictional force exerted on the stylus by the record does not act in line with the arm tube. It acts on one side, so that the arm tube functions as a lever, drawing the assembly inward toward the spindle. This inward force is known as skating force, and if uncorrected, it loads the inner groove wall more heavily than the outer.

The correction is anti-skate, or side bias: a controlled outward force, normally applied at the rear of the arm, that opposes the skating force. When correctly set, the benefits are audible. An easy practical method to set anti-skate is to select a recording with a centrally placed vocal and adjust the bias until the voice is positioned centrally; when the setting is incorrect, the image shifts to one side. Correct adjustment also noticeably improves instrument separation and focus.

Why Anti-Skate Is Not a Complete Solution

In theory, anti-skate would cancel the skating force entirely. In practice, it cannot, because the skating force is not constant.

It varies with the alignment geometry as the stylus moves between the null points and, more significantly, with the recorded material. The drag experienced during a heavily modulated passage, such as an orchestral crescendo, is considerably greater than during a quiet solo passage. As drag increases, the skating force increases, while the anti-skate setting remains fixed. The correction is therefore static, applied to a variable force.

The variation across the record, however, is less extreme than might be expected because record production already compensates to a degree. The inner grooves contain more modulation within a shorter length, which raises friction there and broadly offsets the lower groove velocity. Nonetheless, the variation is never fully eliminated, which is why anti-skate should be regarded as the most effective available measure rather than a definitive solution.

Tracking Error or Side Force: Which Is More Important?

This is the more in-depth question, and several designers have approached it from an unconventional standpoint.

The ViV Laboratory Rigid Float, designed by Koichiro Akimoto, prioritises reducing side force over minimising angular tracking error. The arm is unconventionally short at 7″ (although it also comes in 9″ and 13″ variants); it is underhung from the turntable’s spindle, with no overhang and no offset angle, so that it is perfectly tangent at only one single point. Interestingly, the lack of an offset at the headshell results in substantially lower side force than with a conventional arm. The trade-off, however, involves some pretty big compromises: geometric tracking error across the remainder of the record is significantly higher. It has attracted a committed following, which underlines the central point: both factors matter and affect performance. Emphasising one compromises the other.

Designs That Aim to Eliminate Tracking Error

For those seeking to eliminate angular error entirely, several approaches exist, each with its own cost.

The simplest is a pivoting headshell, such as the NASOTEC unit, which mounts onto a standard bayonet headshell connector. The headshell pivots freely, letting groove drag draw it into alignment at every point, while a pair of lightly tensioned springs restrains it. The method reduces tracking error but also reduces rigidity, and rigidity is what holds the cartridge stable. Adding springs in such a crucial area of the tonearm sacrifices the arm’s inertial stability and rigidity.

A more refined solution is the Thales arm, which uses two arm tubes and a cam mechanism to continuously adjust the headshell angle, maintaining tangency throughout the arc while providing considerably greater rigidity than a pivoting headshell. The geometry is complex, which is one reason such arms are typically high-end, but this arrangement also limits the tube thickness you can use, introduces a second resonant structure, and again sacrifices ultimate rigidity at the tonearms headshell.

Tangential trackers, including designs by Reed and Schröder, move the arm’s base, guided by a system of levers, so that the stylus remains square to the groove. These are accomplished and necessarily costly, since the additional pivots must be made rigid and free of resonance. The complication with tangential tracking tonearms is whether the friction of the groove is able to pull the entire arm assembly back and forth – which isn’t hard to imagine when it’s generally accepted that this happens in almost all horizontal bearing types with most tonearms (excluding the Supatrac). Fixed-base pivoted arms might employ angled pivots, lower the pivot point as close to the playing surface as possible, or add mass and other stabilising techniques to their horizontal pivot. The base of a tangential tracker, however, has to move in order to achieve tangency, which leaves it more open to back and forth motion than any other type of tonearm. Some manufacturers can constrain the moving base adequately; others less so.

The linear, or parallel, tracker represents the theoretical ideal. Mounted on a rail, it follows the cutting lathe’s straight-line path directly. In practice, it introduces its own difficulties: air-bearing designs require pumps that must often be sited remotely for acceptable quietness, mounting can be awkward, and the principal challenge is inertia. The entire arm must move laterally to follow the groove, and with eccentric records, the groove must displace that mass, generating side force in the process. Having designed a parallel tracker through to completion, Mark concluded that the mass which must be moved introduces problems that a well-executed pivoted arm avoids. Michael Fremer and JR Boisclair also highlighted further issues in a video here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=F-jwc5qpnjY&t=444s, which makes a convincing case that, because air pressure in the air-bearing constantly leaks from either side of the assembly, the bearing is not rigid and these designs will tend to cause microvibration in the horizontal axes, unless it is in rare instances a fully enclosed air bearing without the open sides commonly found in such designs.

Recommended Approach

We’re still left with the fact that the vast majority of arms are pivoted, arcing designs. Which means the geometry cannot be made linear.  However, what you can control is the placement of the two null points. As noted, this controls how we distribute distortion across the arc.

We recommend the Baerwald (Löfgren A) alignment, as it minimises the maximum distortion across the whole record surface rather than concentrating the benefit in one region. Stevenson positions its second null point at the inner groove, which suits listeners who prioritise a clean conclusion to the side and is often preferred for classical material (for the cleanest finale). Löfgren B minimises the average (RMS) distortion at the cost of higher peaks at the extremes. Other geometries, such as UNI-DIN, also merit consideration and further evaluation, as this may well get the best of both, by lowering distortion in the middle and inner grooves of the record.

The underlying principle is unchanged. No alignment makes the geometry more linear; it relocates the points of perfect tangency. Since every geometry is a compromise, the appropriate course is to select the one that favours the material you listen to most. If your most valued recordings generally lie toward the inner groove, bias the alignment accordingly; if your collection favours pressings cut toward the middle and outer edge (where many audiophile pressings now place all tracks), a different choice is warranted.

I hope this article has shown that tracking error does matter, but if we set out to eliminate it completely, we simply introduce compromises in other areas of playback. We know that major compromises in bearing or headshell rigidity will lead to smearing from more vibration as well as less stability for the cartridge. There’s a strong case that freedom from vibration-induced smearing matters far more than freedom from distortion caused by tracking error.

This is the aspect that “zero compromise” claims omit. Tracking error matters, as do side force, rigidity, inertia, and groove modulation. A well-designed tonearm isn’t one that has eliminated every problem. No such arm exists. It’s one where the design is executed with an understanding of which compromises to make, and why.

Not just tracking error

If you’ve ever asked why longer tonearms are supposed to sound better, you’ve probably been told the answer is tracking error. A longer arm traces a flatter arc across the record, so the cartridge sits closer to perpendicular with the groove, and distortion is lower. This is because when records are cut, the cutterhead travels in a straight line across the lacquer’s surface. When using a pivoted tonearm with a stationary base, the cartridge on the arm actually travels in an arc, across the record, not a straight line. So… The longer the arm, the straighter the arc the cartridge travels through, right?

It’s a clean story. It’s also, in our view, almost entirely the wrong reason.

The actual peak difference in tracking distortion between a well-aligned 9.5″ arm and a 12″ arm is around 0.5%. That’s the difference in total harmonic distortion measured at the worst point on the record, the inner grooves, where common cartridge alignments like Lofgren and Baerwald are the least forgiving. Across most of a side, it’s far smaller at 0.15-0.2% difference

Yet, for the first two-thirds of a record, where the difference in distortion is tiny, 9.5″ and 12″ actually sound distinctly different.

A 0.5% difference is not what people are hearing when they describe a 12″ arm as smoother, more relaxed, and weightier in the bass. Something else is doing that work. After decades of building both lengths of models of the same arm, we think the real story is inertia.

What people actually hear

Before getting into why, it’s worth being clear about what the sonic difference between the two actually is, because the trade-off is real, even if the explanation usually given for it isn’t.

A 9.5″ arm tends to sound faster. Quick transitions are navigated deftly. There’s more attack, more punch. Music has a sharper leading edge. It can also sound a touch harsher, depending on the cartridge and the system.

A 12″ arm sounds smoother and more relaxed. There’s more bass weight, more sense of ease, and detail. Some listeners find this more musical. Others find it slightly less immediate and lacking in the bite they might need for their listening preferences.

Most listeners hearing the actual differences prefer the 12″ arm. But it’s a preference, not a clear technical win, and there are genres and systems where the shorter arm is the better match. Rock, pop, hard bop jazz, and anything that lives on attack and dynamics often comes alive on a 9.5″. Classical, vocal, and music that depends on tonal weight and ease often favours a 12″.

Why 12″ tonearms don’t solve tracking error

A 9.5″ arm and a 12″ arm both sweep an arc across the record because both are pivoted. Neither tracks in a true straight line. The difference is that the 12″ arm’s arc is slightly flatter, so the cartridge sits at a smaller angular error relative to the groove tangent at most points on the record.

The two arms have two “null points” each, where the cartridge sits exactly perpendicular to the groove. Between and outside those points, both arms have some error. The 12″ arm’s worst-case error is smaller, but only by enough to produce around 0.5% less distortion at the worst point on the record.

That figure is the heart of the problem with the conventional explanation. A 0.5% difference, present only at the inner grooves, cannot account for sonic differences that are obvious within a few seconds of listening across the whole side of a record. Something larger is going on.

Inertia is the larger thing

Rotational inertia is an object’s resistance to rotation. For a tonearm, the relevant formula is I = m × r². The inertia is proportional to the mass times the square of the distance from the pivot.

That squaring matters. Doubling the length of an arm quadruples its inertia at constant mass. Going from a 9.5″ effective length to a 12″ effective length increases rotational inertia by around 60%, even before accounting for the fact that 12″ arms are usually heavier as well.

Inertia is the tonearm’s resistance to being pushed to the side when your cartridge’s stylus is tracing the groove. The cartridge needs a stable reference point to read the groove against. If the arm has too little inertia, the arm itself moves when the stylus does, and the cartridge can’t tell the two motions apart, resulting in smearing. If the arm has greater inertia, it sits more firmly in the groove, and the cartridge reads more cleanly.

This is also why higher-inertia arms tend to deliver better bass. The lowest frequencies require the most energy from the cartridge, and the arm has to hold steady against that energy. A longer arm holds steadier, almost regardless of how well it’s designed in other respects.

There’s a related point that’s almost never discussed: the side force needed to deflect a longer arm is lower than for a shorter one. The mechanics of leverage mean a 12″ arm offers less resistance to lateral movement at the cartridge end, even though it has more inertia overall. The combination of high rotational inertia and low applied side force is part of what gives longer arms their characteristic ease of use. This also means less anti-skate is being applied, resulting in less added, potentially disruptive, force being applied to the arm (especially with worse side-bias mechanisms).

What to actually buy

This is the question we get most often. The short answer: a well-designed 9.5″ arm will beat a poorly-designed 12″ arm every time, and it isn’t close.

Arm length is one factor in a long list of factors that determine how a tonearm performs. Bearing design, tube construction, internal damping, counterweight design, and a dozen other variables matter more than the choice between 9.5″ and 12″. The length difference is real, but it sits below most of those other variables in order of importance.

The practical implications:

If your turntable can only accommodate a 9.5″, don’t lose sleep over it. You can build an extraordinary system around a good 9.5″ arm.

If you can fit either, and your budget is fixed, it’s usually better to go up the range with a more sophisticated 9.5″ than across to a 12″ lower in the range. A more sophisticated 9.5″ arm will generally outperform a less sophisticated 12″ arm, even though it has the advantage in length. Often, the features employed to handle vibration in a more sophisticated arm are audibly more important than the benefit of length.

If your budget allows both, our own preference is the 12″. We find it more relaxing, more musically accessible, and easier to listen to over long sessions. But this is a preference, not a verdict, and a serious listener with a rock-heavy collection might reasonably come down the other way.

The thing that matters most is not the length. It’s the design.

Small job, big impact

A tonearm bearing has one of the smallest jobs in a hi-fi system and yet, one of the most consequential. It has to let the arm pivot freely while the cartridge reads movements measured in microns at 2-4 tonnes of pressure, up to 40,000 times a second. Get it seriously wrong and everything downstream is compromised: timing, tracking, dynamics, imaging, the lot.

After forty years of building, modifying, and rewiring just about every arm on the market, we’ve had a lot of experience with all sorts of bearings up close, as well as discussing many bearing systems with their designers face to face at hifi shows. We’ve compiled our thoughts on different tonearm bearings below.

What a bearing has to do

Four requirements, in tension with each other. Every design is a compromise between them.

Low friction. Records are rarely perfectly centred, so the arm tracks in and out continuously as the platter rotates. Beyond that, the groove itself demands free movement up and down from the tonearm to allow the cartridge to stay central in the groove, as it tracks a 3-dimensional, modulated waveform in much the same way a mogul skier might traverse a mogul field.  A high-friction bearing can’t keep up with the demands of this movement, resulting in smeared transients in your music. The stylus drags against the groove instead of riding it, sidewall pressure rises, and record wear accelerates.

Friction: Stiction. Stiction is a type of friction that is another fundamentally important part of tonearm bearing design. Like friction, stiction relates to freedom of movement,  namely, peak static friction. This is the force required to initiate movement between two stationary objects; here, it is how easily the tonearm, mounted with a cartridge, allows the bearings to move as the vinyl plays. It is crucial in the tonearm to have low-stiction bearings which can easily move and react to dynamic passages in the music pressed on your vinyl. The highest stiction means the tonearm gets… stuck. High-stiction bearings move very sluggishly and cause tracking errors with the cartridge. Even if it’s not heard in skipping or channel imbalances, high-stiction bearings limit the cartridge’s free movement and tracking. This limits the overall system’s fidelity and damages transients in every respect. Low stiction allows for a fast reaction to dynamics and transitions, benefiting all aspects of the music. The lower the stiction, the better; the higher the stiction? expect to be hearing smearing.

Rigidity. This sounds like a contradiction with low friction, but it isn’t. The bearing should rotate freely around its intended axes and resist everything else. We’re talking about play measured in microns, which sounds trivial until you remember the scale of what the cartridge is tracking and how it amplifies those movements by a factor of thousands. A bearing with even slight backwards-and-forward play introduces shockwaves into the arm every time the stylus hits a transient. This can be improved by adding mass in the right areas and by using some engineering know-how to determine where and how the pivots are placed.

Energy transfer. All tonearms vibrate, at some level. A key task is getting vibration in the arm to leave and, importantly, not to reflect back. The bearing is one of the main exit routes, and also a potential entry point for vibration from the turntable. So which matters more? In an ideal world, you’d want a joint that lets energy flow in one direction but not the other. Some designers will tell you that’s impossible. We disagree: bearings genuinely exhibit asymmetric behaviour depending on their design and geometry, and the right balance depends on the rest of the system. A well-isolated turntable lets you prioritise extracting energy from the arm. A noisier deck pushes you toward keeping energy from getting in.

Reliability. A well-built tonearm should last fifty years or more. We still see arms we built three decades ago performing as they did the day they shipped. Unreliability can creep in through poor-quality components or sloppy assembly, causing components to drift out of alignment over time or fail altogether.

The main families

Gimbal bearings: small ball races on perpendicular axles, the type used in skateboards and countless other applications. Most of the industry uses them. We do too, across our entry-level models, because when they’re done properly, they work very well. The catch is “done properly”: ball size, steel grade, cage design, race smoothness, and tolerance class all matter, and they all sound different. Ball bearings can be high-stiction and harder to move. This is why we specify our own bearings rather than buying them off the shelf, to ensure they are not overly tight and the stiction stays as low as possible. 

One detail worth mentioning: where the gimbal sits matters as much as how it’s built. Rega’s arms place the bearings inside the arm tube. When we started modifying Rega tonearms in the eighties, the single most effective change we made was relocating the bearings into the yoke, outside the tube. Bearings vibrate. You don’t want that vibration happening inside the part of the arm carrying the signal.

Uni-pivot bearings: a single spike resting in a cup. Beautifully simple, cheap to manufacture, and inherently low-friction and low-stiction. It dominates the budget end of the high-performance market for good reason. The downsides are real, though: the spike is vulnerable to damage, and a single point can’t constrain rotation around the arm’s own axis, so designers compensate by hanging the counterweight well below the pivot, or in the worst cases, using high-friction cones to stabilise the pivot. Setup is notoriously fiddly, and this bearing type cannot remain stable in the azimuth plane, 

There’s a clever variant where the spike locates against three small ball bearings instead of a flat cup floor. Friction increases, but rigidity improves dramatically, and vibration is transmitted out of the arm more effectively. Whether the trade is worth it depends on what you value.

A recent breakthrough in this area has been the SUPATRAC tonearm, which uses a sideways unipivot, meaning the arm’s pivot is locked against the drag of the groove, and cannot shift backwards and forwards during playback. It’s an ingenious design by an ingenious designer and friend. For the SUPATRAC philosophy, it is a coherent design. To achieve our own design goals, however, we employ a dual-pivot bearing.

Dual pivot bearings: What we use across our premium and high-end tonearm ranges. Two points into two cups, either side of the armtube handle vertical movement; conventional gimbals on the same plate handle horizontal rotation. You get the low-friction energy-transfer characteristics of point contact on the vertical axis, the stability and easy setup of gimbals on the horizontal, and adjustable azimuth as a bonus. The other interesting thing about this bearing type is the ability to mass load the pivot and add inertia to all axess.

Is the hybrid a compromise? Deliberately so. No single bearing type wins on all four requirements. A well-executed ball race outperforms a poor uni-pivot; a well-executed uni-pivot outperforms a mediocre ball race. Combining them lets each do what it does best.

Interestingly, three manufacturers in Europe: Kuzma, Moerch and Origin Live, independently arrived at the dual-pivot idea around 15 years ago. Nobody copied anyone. The bearing system just makes sense once you’ve spent enough time with the alternatives.

The exotic options, briefly

Ferrofluid-floated bearings: The arm floats on a bed of magnetic fluid, supposedly decoupling it from the arm board. The decoupling claim doesn’t really hold up. magnetic fluids, magnetic fields, air, and string all transmit vibration. Everything does, to some degree. There are no isolation barriers in this world, only better and worse compromises. This entails a fundamental lack of rigidity that prevents proper tracking of the record groove.

Hanging-thread bearings. The Schröder approach: the arm hangs from a high-tensile thread, sometimes with a paddle dipped in ferrofluid for damping. Genuinely ingenious, excellent freedom of movement. The practical challenge is controlling sway during cueing. Clearaudio’s variant uses a small magnet beneath the arm to stabilise it.

Magnetic bearings. The arm is held between opposing magnets, with nothing solid contacting it. Zero mechanical friction in the bearing itself, but that just throws the spotlight on a point most people miss:

On a well-designed gimbal arm, the arm cable accounts for roughly 70% of the total friction in the bearing system. The bearings themselves are a minority of the horizontal torque problem.

That figure changes how you think about everything. It’s why cable routing matters as much as bearing choice. We hold the cable hole in our yokes to 2mm; even 3mm measurably increases friction, because the cable starts to wander off-axis and create leverage on rotation. It’s also why we route the cable internally. An external run picks up RF, and we’ve measured radio interference even with as little as 4 inches of unshielded cable. 

Air bearings. Almost exclusively used on linear-tracking arms. They elegantly solve the tracking-error problem, but linear trackers have inherent issues: the effective mass is high because the entire assembly has to translate sideways, not just pivot. Some well-known designs run at 70g effective mass, which has uncomfortable implications for long-term record wear. A reasonable target is 25–30g — achievable, but the rest of the engineering is hard.

One of the larger issues here is keeping the air pressure genuinely constant and captive. Most air bearing designs have open sides that leak air pressure and allow horizontal play. Another issue here is how the cabling and air hose interact with the moving assembly – these are likely to introduce unwanted forces in the horizontal plane. 

Flex bearings. A thin, flexible membrane that bends rather than pivots. The advantage is the elimination of stiction: the slight extra friction required to get a stationary bearing moving. The trade-off is rigidity: to flex easily, the membrane has to be thin, and that thinness also allows vibration in both directions.

What to avoid

A short list of bearings we’d steer clear of as a buyer:

• Horizontal-point bearings (two spikes pointing outward from the arm tube into cups). The assembly pressure required to keep the spikes located feeds vibration straight into the tube. We’ve tried it. It sounds poor.
• Knife bearings (a knife edge in a V-groove). Effectively obsolete. Reliable forever, but the contact area is enormous, and it fails on three of the four requirements simultaneously.
• Ferrofluid-decoupled bearings, for the reasons above.

For everyone else, a general principle: if you don’t want to spend setup time fussing with azimuth and balance, a well-made conventional gimbal is the most user-friendly bearing of the lot. There’s no shame in that; it’s part of why gimbals remain on so much of our range.

In terms of absolute performance, we believe Dual-Pivot excels in all of the listed areas, which is why you’ll find them on the premium and high-end side of our range. 

The point

Bearings, like every other element of tonearm design, are about execution. There is no single “best” type. What matters is how well the chosen approach is realised: bearing quality, placement, cable management, and the mass & rigidity of everything around it. The job isn’t to chase a theoretical ideal off the track; it’s to understand the compromises clearly enough to find the best solution, and the other design opportunities that bearing allows.

Pick up almost any record weight on the market, and the first thing you notice is the heft. Most are dense lumps of metal, 300 grams, 500 grams, sometimes more than a kilo. The Origin Live Gravity Two weighs 70 grams. Roughly the weight of a chocolate bar.

People reasonably ask why. The answer is the result of five years of prototyping, several hundred listening sessions, and a quiet revolt against an idea the hi-fi industry has clung to for decades: that heavier is better.

What does a record weight actually do?

There are only two honest reasons to put anything on top of a record.

The first, and most common, is to flatten a warped record, so the cartridge isn’t constantly chasing the surface, and the vertical tracking angle stays consistent across the side. This is uncontroversial and generally the goal of the majority of weights & clamps on the market.

The second is to improve the sound by managing the vinyl’s vibration. This is where every weight on the market gets it wrong.

Why does a record vibrate during playback?

Look closely at the contact point between a stylus tip and the groove wall. The accepted figures for the pressure at that point sit somewhere between 1.2 and 8 tons per square inch – numbers that sound absurd until you remember the contact area is smaller than a human hair.

Now factor in speed. A stylus tracking high-frequency information is moving back and forth at up to 50,000 cycles per second (20,000 in most cases). Momentum is mass times acceleration, and at those speeds, even a feather-light tip is hammering the groove walls with serious force.

The result is that the record surface is being mechanically excited into vibration every time the stylus tracks it. That vibration radiates outward across the vinyl in ripples. High frequencies as fast, tight ripples, lows as long, slow ones. These vibrations can reflect and travel back towards the stylus, which causes issue for the fidelity with which your cartridge can track the groove. And if we have something affecting fidelity at input, it’s a given that this will affect our output once the signal reaches the speakers.

The cartridge signal is amplified roughly 8,000 times before it reaches the speakers. So no, it isn’t a small problem, and it isn’t one the record player can solve on its own. Even a turntable with perfect isolation from floor noise, motor noise, and acoustic feedback would still face this problem, because it originates at the stylus itself.

Two schools of thought: Mass/Suction vs Transmission and Dissipation

Once you accept the record is vibrating, the question becomes what to do about it. Broadly, there are two approaches.

The suction approach. Pull the entire record flat against the platter with a vacuum, eliminating any movement. Rockport tried this 40 years ago. Some manufacturers still do — there are decks at £70,000 built around the idea. The problem is that perfectly bonding the record to the platter assumes the platter itself isn’t vibrating. It always is. The bearing the platter is mounted on has friction, motors make noise, and now you’ve created a rigid pipeline feeding all that energy straight into the vinyl and back up through the stylus.

The reputation of these systems bears this out. At a recent Munich show, an audiophile sought advice from Origin Live about his £70,000 vacuum deck. He described it as “dull, lifeless, sterile.” The verdict, regrettably, was that the problem was largely beyond fixing. Vacuum systems suck the noise out of a record. They also suck out the delicacy of the music.

Mass in the weight and platter essentially do the same thing as suction, coupling the vinyl record to the platter with a large weight. Make no mistake, we are not against mass in our design philosophy, but it has to be applied in the right places. The vibration created by the pressure of playback needs to travel away from the record. Many listeners think that coupling the record to the mass will sink the vibrations into the mass, but the truth is that the mass will not transmit the vibrations away fast enough and not across the entire frequency band. Mass is great at the end of a transmission chain, but not at the beginning. When excess energy doesn’t have a chance to escape away from the cartridge, it has no option but to travel back in. This may result in a benefit to bass – since the stylus may travel with increased force side to side, but it comes at the cost of diminished top-end openness and a dull mid-band.

The transmission and dissipation approach. Let the record vibrate, it has to vibrate somewhere – but absorb the vibration at the centre so it dissipates harmlessly rather than reflecting back into the stylus. This is what a properly designed record weight does. It gives the energy somewhere to go.

The trick is doing this without killing the music in the process. Which is harder than it sounds.

How we found light record weights improve sound quality,

For most of Origin Live’s history, founder Mark Baker dismissed record weights entirely. Every time he tried one, the bass would improve, and everything else would suffer, the midrange would close in, the timing would slow, the top end would lose its air. It always felt like a trade-off, never an upgrade.

The change came at a hi-fi show. Origin Live was sharing a room with Martin Brewster of Revelation Audio, the importer of Shun Mook, who had brought along their record weight, a small, comparatively light object that now retails for around £3,800. Listening to it for the first time was a shock. It made the record sound better with no obvious compromise.

Two things stood out. It was light. And it clearly wasn’t trying to flatten the record — it was conditioning it. That was the moment the assumptions began to come apart.

Why 70 grams is the sweet spot

Years of prototyping followed. Many of the early attempts were heavily packed with mixed ball bearings, exotic fillings, and layered metal. The temptation to chase mass is real because mass does deliver bass.

But across hundreds of listening sessions and prototypes, one number kept emerging: 70 grams. Go heavier, and the midrange compresses, the treble loses openness, and the music’s life drains out. Go significantly lighter, and there isn’t enough damping authority. Either side of that figure, the sound moved in the wrong direction.

This is, in retrospect, why so many heavyweights on the market sound the way they do. They’re optimising for the one thing that’s easiest to hear in a demo — bass impact — at the expense of everything else.

A useful test track during development was Minnie Riperton’s Lovin’ You. She has a five-octave range and reaches into the whistle register on that recording. When mass was added beyond 70g, the entire frequency spectrum shifted downwards. The bass got fuller, but Riperton stopped sounding like Riperton. The air and openness in the upper register — the thing that makes that recording extraordinary — collapsed.

That kind of loss isn’t subtle once you know to listen for it.

Layer technology: why no single material works

The second breakthrough came from working with industry veteran Tony Sharman, who pushed Origin Live toward an approach he called Multi- layer technology.

Hi-fi has a recurring weakness for miracle materials. Carbon fibre, beryllium, Delrin (known industrially as POM-C or to us Acetyl and treated by much of the industry as a near-mystical damping compound). All of them have good properties. None is a complete answer on its own.

The principle behind layer technology is straightforward: two materials that resonate at different frequencies, brought into contact, cancel each other’s resonance. It’s mechanical destructive interference rather than acoustical. The Gravity Two stacks multiple layers: lightweight metallic parts with precision-cut profiles, wood, composites, and polymers. Each is chosen for its resonant frequency and its interactions with its neighbours.

Crucially, it’s not relying on any single layer of suspension or absorption to do all the work. The energy passes through a sequence of mismatched layers, losing coherence at each interface, until what reaches the top of the stack is so dissipated that it cannot reflect back into the record.

This can’t be properly modelled. You could theoretically run Fourier analysis on every layer combination, but the simulation space is enormous and — in practice — the model and the listening result usually disagree. The only honest method is to build it, listen to it, and iterate. Which is exactly what happened, for five years between two versions.

From Gravity One to Gravity Two

The Gravity One did what it set out to do: it improved the sound without taking anything away. For a long stretch, it sat at the top of Paul Rigby’s The Audiophile Man comparison reviews, where he had pitted it against around 15 other weights.

Then Stack Audio released a rival lightweight design that briefly overtook it by a narrow margin, the Serene Stabiliser. As fortune would have it, Origin Live was already deep into developing the Gravity Two. Not as a reaction to the Stack Audio Serene, but because we knew the Gravity One still had headroom. At launch, the performance gains from our research and development enabled the Gravity Two to reclaim the top spot.

Several things changed between the Gravity One and Two:

Fewer components. The Gravity One had ten internal parts; the Gravity Two has eight. Every part is a potential transmission and reflection path for vibration, so fewer is generally better — provided each one is the right thing.

Fewer screws. Nine in the Gravity One, four in the Gravity Two. Same reasoning.

A new outer body. The Gravity One contacts the record only at the centre. The Gravity Two adds a refined outer body (made from an anti-resonant polymer that, unusually for the industry, isn’t Delrin), which also makes contact with the record surface and helps absorb vibration. The outer case is also made with additive manufacturing (fancy talk for 3D printing) with structural profiling that increases rigidity, as well as vibrational transmission and dispersion.

That last change was, frankly, an accident. Chief engineer Luke Baker was experimenting late in the prototyping phase and tried bringing the outer case into contact with the record. It went against the structural design philosophy that the rest of the design had been built around, but it also sounded clearly better. The team kept it.

What reviewers actually hear

In his review of the Gravity Two, Paul Rigby noted that music became “much more coherent” with a clear reduction in noise and vibration. High-frequency hash no longer filled the gaps in the music or distorted the presentation. Midrange and treble were clearer, with a slight edge removed from the upper mids. Guitars and secondary percussion sat in sharper focus. Vocals had better diction, lyrics that had previously slipped past were suddenly intelligible. The stereo image was solid and tightly focused, and the bass offered more impact.

The best result is the one most people find counterintuitive. A 70-gram weight has no business delivering a more natural bass impact with greater decay. But what it’s doing is removing the noise and resonance that mask low-frequency detail — so the bass that’s already on the record finally arrives intact, rather than fighting through a haze of upper-frequency hash.

Try it

The Gravity Two is £230 and comes with a 30-day money-back guarantee. Origin Live stockists across the UK and internationally honour the same guarantee. The price is broadly comparable to a modest cartridge upgrade, and the weight will outlast several cartridges.

Skepticism is the right starting position with anything in hi-fi. Order one, put it on whatever turntable you currently run, and listen. If it doesn’t do what we say it does, send it back.

That’s the only honest way to settle these arguments.

Are Transients the Real Case for Vinyl?

Not Just a Collector’s item.

This may annoy you. It’s either well-trodden ground or simply tone-deaf; after all, does a case for vinyl need to be made when it’s currently the highest-grossing format on the market?

But this is not a case for vinyl as physical media, which is burdened with tropes about tactility, collectability, and offline sentiment. As great as those things are, this is a case for vinyl’s superiority with respect to its transients, and that is probably what will annoy vinyl critics the most. 

So, apologies for what is to ensue as I hitch up my waders and get into the longest-running debate in audiophile history: analogue vs digital.

Coming to Terms

If you’ve described vinyl’s appeal as “warmth,” you may have fallen into a common trap. Media often uses “warmth” as a catch-all explanation for vinyl’s resurgence. It hints at a difference between analogue and digital without explaining what that difference really is.

That’s understandable. Most people rarely experience a decent vinyl system, let alone compare it directly to digital.

Can we expect casual observers of the vinyl revival to dig deeper? “Warmth” is valid, but it’s only the surface. In my view, it’s not even the most important or convincing factor, since it’s often poo-pooed by vinyl critics as distortion.

Despite booming sales, many buyers still need convincing to actually play the records they purchase. If we want analogue to thrive long-term, we need to explain vinyl’s benefits more clearly and precisely. So let’s talk about the crucial term here: Transients.

Transients

This case is about transients. There are many other aspects of sound to be claimed by the digital or vinyl camps. But when it comes to transients, I am firmly planting the flag in the analogue territories. 

To qualify, this isn’t about whether you can digitally model an analogue signal and its transients. You can. But perfect computer modelling and real-world playback are different things. So Shannon and Nyquist be damned, this is an argument that analogue creates an audio signal more efficiently, with less corruption, resulting in audible differences in transients.

For those new to the game, a transient is a short-duration, high-amplitude burst of energy occurring at the very beginning of a sound waveform. It represents the initial “impact” or attack—such as a drum hit, guitar pick, or vocal consonant—before the sound settles into its sustained phase. Transients are crucial for perceived punch, definition, and rhythm, but a lot more on that to come..

When Vinyl Sounds Better.

Walking around Hi-Fi shows, visiting dealerships, and in my own system (and friends’), one difference always stands out between analogue and digital: analogue’s superior soundstaging.

Soundstaging is how the various elements of the music present themselves in a 3-dimensional space. We use the terms ‘sound stage’, ‘stereo image’, or ‘imaging’ to refer to the sonic presentation of height, width, and depth, and the position of sounds in that space. 

Vinyl systems deliver a greater sense of 3-dimensionality, especially in the depth of different elements of the sound, while digital presentations are closer to a 2-dimensional left-to-right pan. This stems from how transients are handled.

Digital lovers, why trust me, a chip in the game vinyl evangelist? Hear the argument from your own side:

In a 2024 Munich High End interview with John Darko, Chord Electronics digital consultant Rob Watts said of his M Scaler products:

“The big problem with digital is the timing of transients” 

Now, to begin to understand what Watts is saying here, we first need to understand exactly what transients are.

What are Transients?

Transients refer to the initial rise and peak of a sound wave. This is the sound of the strike of a cymbal before the note sustains and decays. These are the consonants or emphasised vowels in the words of a vocal.

These are even the enunciated parts of a word that make it make sense. “I’ve got you under my skin” without its transients would sound something like: “i’e oh oo uner ay ih”. The sound no longer makes sense; everything is slurred and can’t convey the line’s meaning. 

In the same sense, a drum snare would no longer sound like a snare, or a guitar like a guitar, maybe uncanny psychedelic ones at best. And uncanny is a good term here, because without the transients, the phrase is unable to sound natural or real. 

All music has transients, so even Aphex Twin’s otherworldly ambient techno masterpiece ‘Selected Ambient Works 85-92’ would lose its airiness, its sense of beat, texture, and space without some level of transients during playback.

In a stereo mix, several instruments and or vocals are combined, each delivering their own transients that rise and peak in the music. But transient’s dont just control attack, and don’t just make things sound accurate, they also control the space and time of the soundstage.  Watts explains this well: 

“Transients are used by the brain so that we can perceive instruments as separate entities, locating those instruments in space, the timbre and pitch.”

So transients control our understanding and recognition of different words, and notes delivered by voices and instruments. As part of a waveform travelling at different speeds and amplitudes, they also control how we perceive space in the music, as well as any sense of timing, and the dynamic range.

How This Relates to Hi-Fi

The speed, efficiency, and control with which the playback system creates and delivers transients determine how you experience the dimensionality of your music. 

Personally, I’m more engaged when things sound more three-dimensional, “In the room” and expansive in all directions. 

The Problem with Digtial Transients

Watts assesses digital audio with refreshing, if not brutal, honesty: 

“The big problem with the current digital is the timing of transients, and when you put the digital signal into an interpolation filter, and every single DAC on the planet has got an interpolation filter, the timing of transients is all wrong. They’re shifting backwards and forwards continuously, and this shifting backwards and forwards of the timing of transients confuses the brain, and as a result, your instruments lack separation, you don’t get timbre variation, and you can’t locate instruments in space’ 

Watt’s is revealing all of this of course, because the Quintet M Scaler is his, and Chord Electronics solution to this problem. But taking that aside, one of the keys to the argument for vinyl was in his next answer in the Darko interview. John asks Rob: Why is the Quintet able to do this and not the Dave? (the model below) Watts replies that the reason the Quintet can deliver improved transients is:

“Simply because of the amount of processing power. The more processing power you’ve got delivers much better sound quality because you can more accurately reconstruct the timing of transients. If you wanted to perfectly reconstruct the original timing, you would need an infinite amount of processing.”

 Watts goes on to say that the algorithm used to reconstruct perfect transients is more important even than the infinite processing power required. The total development time for the proprietary coding in the Quartet took 6 years of development.

With digital, better transients are beginning to be delivered by using large amounts of power to process the digital source through an extremely complicated algorithm to enhance the digital signal. Watts’ endeavour is remarkable, innovative, and to be applauded.

The Case for Vinyl

Vinyl contrasts sharply: no conversion needed. No DAC, no interpolation filter, no timing corruption from digital processing.

Digital requires huge amounts of electricity for that processing. Here’s something we can all agree on: Mains power is noisy, so designers obsess over power supplies to reduce interference that blurs transients. It only takes a bit of time spent with an oscilloscope to see the evidence for yourself. Even batteries carry inherent noise.

Vinyl’s signal? Mechanically generated at full resolution. No electrical power required to create it

Digital playback takes electricity; vinyl playback makes electricity.

Your Cartridge Generates Brand New Electricity.

The cantilever attached to your stylus moves a magnet in coils (MM) or coils in magnets (MC), inducing current via electromagnetic induction. The cartridge is a tiny generator creating fresh electrical signal—left and right channels—without any prior power input.

Only after the tonearm wires does the signal hit its first electrical stage: the phono stage’s RIAA EQ, done with simple analogue electronics. No digital-to-analogue conversion, no upsampling, no special transient processing.

The cartridge is a transducer: mechanical energy → electrical energy. The tonearm has no power supply, no mains dependence. It delivers a raw analogue waveform.

Vinyl needs negligible power for EQ in the phono stage—but nothing to “enhance” or correct transients. Good analogue playback lets transients flow untampered from the source.

Interference with the source in vinyl systems is mostly mechanical (hence the need for premium gear), not electrical mains noise.

This is why good analogue playback is able to deliver such effective transients. In contrast to the slightly confused transients that Watts describes as endemic to basically all DACs on the market, the analogue signal delivers transients untampered straight from the source material. There is essentially no electrical interference of the kind faced by the rest of the mains taking system.

Sound of the police

I’m sure the measurements police will be after me for this one, with some kind of number that points to digital superiority. What’s more, I have no measurable data to provide you with. I can only point to the facts regarding electricity, and talk about the subjective experience I have after decades of being raised in the industry, of experiences in our listening room comparing CD to vinyl, streaming to Vinyl, and high-res to Vinyl.

I hear the same thing at every Hi-Fi Show I go to yearly in my job role, and every dealership I’ve visited who have been willing to make the comparison. For the digital crowd, this is unlikely to be enough. You’ll likely think I have probably developed some kind of Stockholm Syndrome, having been indoctrinated into vinyl from birth.

I’ll point out again that Rob Watts himself is the one pointing to a weakness in digital. Weakness in contrast to what? In contrast to an analogue signal. Without an analogue signal, we probably wouldn’t even know that depth could be such a sublime part of stereo playback, or just how good separation and soundstaging can get. And it’s not just Watts either. There are many developers in the industry who unexpectedly favour analogue, but wouldn’t make such comments on the record. 

Rob Watts makes the case that more attention needs to be directed to the handling of the waveform itself for advancements in digital, rather than resting on the laurels of measurable figures (that may be quite irrelevant to an analogue signal). We listen to sound waves, not numbers. Every employed speaker designer will tell you that numbers always supplement listening. Be brave enough to listen with your ears and consider what a real musician, band, or orchestra in 3-dimensional space would sound like. If you need a reference point, heck, maybe get out of the listening room and attend a concert.

Not all vinyl beats digital. A Crosley is enough to dispel that idea. And this isn’t the case to say only listen to vinyl. There’s fantastic music only available digitally, and there’s fantastic music only on vinyl. Some of my favourite music is poorly mastered and pressed to vinyl. Some of the music I discover listening digitally sounds far better on vinyl. 

Nor is it the case that even all high-end vinyl playback sounds better than digital. Some eyewateringly expensive vinyl systems had some of the driest sounds I heard at Munich last year, and I promise you it wasn’t down to room treatment. But even in those cases, the delivery of the transients still had that signature separation and 3-dimensionality that lies squarely in the ownership of vinyl. Better vinyl systems at the Munich show presented listeners not only with the transients we’ve discussed, but also rich tonal quality and pinpoint timing. The ‘just right’ that vinyl-loving Oldilocks would recognise, and newcomers are trying to understand.

Older readers please take that as a compliment. At 30 almost everyone in the Hi-Fi industry is older than me. It takes the openness of a Rob Watts for me to articulate what I hear in a vinyl system compared to a digital one, to begin to understand what transients are, and to think it through. 

If there’s one takeaway from this, let’s be more open-handed with our knowledge. Many older Hi-Fi aficionados have helped me to understand our terms and concepts in Hi-Fi, in its design and its playback. Conversations that clearly explain what Hi-Fi terminology means help to draw attention to what is happening when we listen. That is crucial for my generation’s understanding of the industry, and equally so, its ability to thrive for years to come.

Thanks for reading. 

– David Baker

An Overlooked Factor

In high-fidelity vinyl playback, the goal is to faithfully reproduce the original sound. Yet there is an often-overlooked factor that undermines that goal: ground noise! This electrical interference creeps into your system and obscures the signal from your cartridge, robbing the music of clarity, dynamics, and life.

The Unique Nature of the Vinyl Signal

Unlike most audio components that draw power from the mains, a phono cartridge operates differently. As the stylus traces the groove, it generates a fresh electrical signal through electromagnetic induction between magnets and coils – a miniature generator at the end of your tonearm. This signal is inherently electrically clean, free from wall-power noise, and often floats relative to ground. Interference with vinyl signal quality is primarily mechanical, stemming from poor bearings, materials, and design.

However, electrically clean, that low-level output is extremely delicate. Moving-magnet (MM) cartridges produce around 5 mV, while moving-coil (MC) designs can drop to as little as 0.1 mV. To transmit this fragile signal through the tonearm without adding mechanical issues, manufacturers use thin, generally unshielded wires inside the armtube. The tube itself serves as shielding but also as an antenna, picking up unwanted radio frequencies (RF), electromagnetic interference (EMI), airborne noise, mains AC hum, and even microphonic vibrations from components.

Any electrical waveform needs a 0V reference (ground) to exist. Your system’s ground, which is tied to the mains earth and component chassis, is bombarded by these disturbances. Standard grounding helps reduce noise, but it’s rarely perfect, leaving residual interference that obscures the music.

How Ground Noise Degrades Sound

The audible effects include a subtle haze or veil over fine details, reduced texture in instruments and vocals, poorer separation between musical elements, and less precisely defined instrument placement within the soundstage. A higher noise floor compresses dynamics, making quiet passages feel compressed and less impactful. True black backgrounds disappear, replaced by a faint interference that reduces overall engagement and realism, particularly in high-resolution systems, classical recordings, or low-level listening, where subtlety is key.

Introducing the Origin Live Ground Anchor

Origin Live’s new Ground Anchor targets this exact problem. Developed in close collaboration with UK noise specialists Puritan Audio Laboratories, it’s a compact grounding tool (160 × 65 × 40 mm) that connects between your tonearm cable grounds and the phonostage’s grounding post.

Inside its enclosure, advanced noise-absorbing technology converts disruptive ground-referenced interference into harmless heat, effectively removing it from the signal path.

The improvements are meaningful. The Ground Anchor provides clarity in detail and texture, deeper black backgrounds, better separation of musical elements, and more precisely defined soundstages. It’s particularly effective with step-up transformers (SUTs), where you often trade detail for space and richness.

A standout feature is the three cartridge-side grounding posts. Origin Live’s premium tonearm cables use multiple grounds (for arm structure, shielding, and optional signal reference) to minimise hum across varying phono-stage designs. This makes connections easier and less cumbersome, with the added benefit of supporting up to three tonearms from a single unit.

Universally compatible with any tonearm and phonostage, the Ground Anchor reflects both our and Puritan’s shared conviction that products must be developed by ear, through real listening tests. 

Hi–Fi History: Why the Tonearm was Invented

As we step into 2025 there are a whole host of upgrades available on the market for your turntable. We make many that get more out of your vinyl grooves. In this article, however, I wanted to explore the origins of the first significant upgrade to the turntable. I’m writing, of course, about the humble then, and maybe not so humble now, tonearm. We have great respect for the early pioneers of audio. If things we now take for granted hadn’t been invented, the high-fidelity experience may have looked very different to how it does today. To look at how tonearms came into existence, we need to look all the way back to 1870, when a German immigrant Emile Berliner landed in New York. He worked menial jobs while spending his evenings conducting experiments with telephone transmitters in a makeshift lab set up in his boardinghouse. Berliner caught the attention of the Bell Telephone Company and began employment there. He soon lost interest in the telephone and instead pursued the creation of a machine for recording and reproducing sound. It was during this time he was able to create the gramophone, which used a horn to acoustically amplify the vibration of a needle (connected to a diaphragm) running through the groove of a shellac record. By doing so, Berliner realised an idea first conceived by French Inventor Charles Cros from the work of French scientist Edouard Leon Scott de Martinville. Berliner realised and developed many of the fundamentals of the turntable and the recorded disc we recognise today, such as the spinning platter and the black disc with its recorded spiral groove. We’d even recognise the metal stamping process used in production today That Berliner invented to mass manufacture recorded shellac discs. At this point in the tonearms story, though, we turn to one of Berliner’s American employees; Eldridge Johnson. Once a machinist, Johnson aided Berliner’s design, improving engineering on the hand-cranked motor and improving the sound box. The sound box was the round assembly pictured below that contained the needle necessary to play through the grooves. Here’s how the gramophone works: Vibrating according to the record’s groove, the needle’s movement causes a diaphragm attached to it to make larger corresponding movements. Much like a speaker driver, as the diaphragm moves, it continuously changes the air pressure in the base of the attached horn. The horn then acoustically amplifies this into a (semi) listenable volume. We might think about this as a very proto cartridge, though the cartridge is, of course, its own groundbreaking invention. See this illustrated here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1tmWIb-7_no If you consider that the entire assembly of the large horn balances on the sound box and the needle, you begin to wonder how the needle managed to move at all. It was counterweighted to some degree, so we could think about the whole assembly as a quasi-tonearm (what’s the effective mass of that eh?). But really the tonearm was invented in 1902 when Johnson developed an additional tube at the base of the horn that could hold the sound box in separation from the weight of the horn and rest with a lot less weight on the record surface. The invention of the tonearm vastly improved the sound quality of the gramophone and hugely reduced the wear and tear to the recorded shellac disc, meaning that users had a closer fidelity to the recorded sound and could use their records for longer! Here’s how the gramophone works: Vibrating according to the record’s groove, the needle’s movement causes a diaphragm attached to it to make larger corresponding movements. Much like a speaker driver, as the diaphragm moves, it continuously changes the air pressure in the base of the attached horn. The horn then acoustically amplifies this into a (semi) listenable volume. We might think about this as a very proto cartridge, though the cartridge is, of course, its own groundbreaking invention. See this illustrated here: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=1tmWIb-7_no If you consider that the entire assembly of the large horn balances on the sound box and the needle, you begin to wonder how the needle managed to move at all. It was counterweighted to some degree, so we could think about the whole assembly as a quasi-tonearm (what’s the effective mass of that eh?). But really the tonearm was invented in 1902 when Johnson developed an additional tube at the base of the horn that could hold the sound box in separation from the weight of the horn and rest with a lot less weight on the record surface. The invention of the tonearm vastly improved the sound quality of the gramophone and hugely reduced the wear and tear to the recorded shellac disc, meaning that users had a closer fidelity to the recorded sound and could use their records for longer! What’s so interesting here is how freedom of movement for the needle to track the groove resulted in a huge improvement in the sound. This is still much the same today, and alongside freedom of movement, there are many more things a tonearm can do to improve sound quality. Our developments may not have been as fundamental as Berliner and Johnson’s, but we have been researching and developing tonearms for over two decades here at Origin Live. We came up with a few innovations in the tonearm realm ourselves, such as the dual pivot bearing for stable vertical freedom of movement, as well as developing highly decoupled gimbal bearing assemblies, multi-layer counterweights, high-performance arm tubes, high mass yokes, and so much more, All painstakingly developed through careful analysis and listening tests. Questions like, ‘Which material out of 20 sounds the best?’ Or ‘How should those components be shaped, weighted, treated, arranged and joined?’ Have been crucial to finding the best performance from vinyl playback in price points ranging from affordable to cost-no-object. Our products come about through engineering principles applied, tested, revised, and tested again, exhaustively, until we find what we’re after: something closer to the original sound of live music. The only absolute sound reference is live music (not amplified live music). Some systems get much closer to this than others. A better tonearm will always help to make this possible. Many notice that a truly high-grade vinyl system has more depth, more dynamics, and more life to it than a digital counterpart. There are many reasons for this. A fundamental reason is that the stylus creates an electrical signal mechanically by electromagnetically inducing a voltage. The cartridge signal pre-phono doesn’t rely on any electrical power for its creation. Digital, unfortunately, does, and no matter how much filtering and regulation goes into treating the power source, many polluting elements such as voltage noise, always remain in varying degrees.  This affects the creation of the digital waveform, its transients, and its subsequent performance. It is also a fact that the analogue signal doesn’t suffer from the digital artefacts created in algorithmically converting signal from CDs, large formats and streaming. Digital artefacts  are distortions and errors that occur during the recording, manipulation and playback of digital audio. Some might argue this is ludicrous because many vinyl records are made from digital recordings, but the dynamic range compression of the master used for making vinyl often tends to be better than its digital counterpart. Not only this however, since this objection overlooks the significance of converting the digital signal into mechanical movements to create the record stamping plate. It is this mechanical movement which filters out many artefacts and is much closer to natural analogue which the ear loves to hear. It is just as true today as it was in 1902 that the tonearm greatly improves the sound quality of your records. Tonearms need to be designed not only to minimise unwanted vibrations, but designed and tuned by ear to take care of the effect on the cartridge signal. There are many subpar examples on the market. Origin Live tonearms offer better performance than any other at an equivalent cost. We pride ourselves on years of development, awards for the results, and, subsequently, more development in our pursuit of higher fidelity. A better tonearm surprises so many with the dramatic level of sonic improvement achieved. Simply providing a rock-solid platform for your cartridge enables it to perform at a whole new level. Of course, a better signal to your speakers, in turn, enables them to perform at a whole new level, with increased separation of instruments, the soundstage widening and deepening, and the timbres of the music hitting you with natural dynamics throughout the whole of the frequency range. You can find out more about our award-winning range of tonearms for every budget here: View Tonearms £480 – £26,000 > If you’d like to contact us for more information or advice, please get in touch via originlive@originlive.com All the best, David Baker

Origin Live have released images of the latest entry in their turntable range: the Swift. Among the Mk5 upgrades announced at the Bristol Hi-Fi show came the news that a new turntable would be entering the range.

On top of the motor/power supply redesign, one of the major upgrades in the Origin Live Mk5 line is the Multi-Layer Platter (MLP); trickle-down tech from their flagship Voyager turntable, now incorporated as standard on all turntables above the Aurora. The Swift is essentially an Aurora turntable with a Multi-Layer Platter. Why include the MLP as standard? Because it sounds too good to simply be an optional extra, says Mark Baker our company’s founder.

The addition of the MLP as standard has increased the cost of the Calypso and Resolution turntables. To keep the range as accessible as possible Origin Live have filled in the price point between the Aurora and the Calypso comes the Swift.

The Swift features the basic design of the Aurora turntable, with its cantilevered design. The platter and tonearm are balanced in equilibrium on a high mass sub-chassis plate. Something that equates roughly to a rigid, mechanical suspension. Origin Live claim this not only avoids both the softening of leading edges often found in suspended designs and the hardness in many non-suspended designs.

It also features their low friction bearing, which the company report now consistently takes at least 2:30 minutes to come to stop from 33rpm when belt less.

This all comes alongside the Mk5 Multi Layer Platter, featuring an intricately designed top with over 1000 individual slots laser cut through the top layer. Combined with another composite layer underneath and carefully screwed on to the acrylic platter (not too tight we are told) the multiple layers work to diffuse surface resonance through vibrational interference. Having spent countless hours laser cutting hundreds of different line profiles to test on the top layer, the Bakers at Origin Live also opted for a label sized hole at the centre of the platter which they claim has added Bass detail and depth.

The Origin Live Swift Mk5 Turntable is available now priced at £2,290. The accompanying Zephyr Mk4 Tonearm pictured is £1,080