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.

A customer phoned us recently

He’d asked his local dealer whether to upgrade his tonearm. The reply: ” Don’t bother, it won’t make any difference.”

We understand why a dealer might say that. Look at the stylus tracing the groove. A needle moving 20,000 times a second, sometimes 40,000 on the best cartridges, withstanding around a thousand G of force. The conclusion seems obvious. The cartridge is doing the work. Everything else just holds it in place.

But this conclusion is wrong. The gap between what most people believe about tonearms and what actually drives sound quality is why we’ve spent nearly 40 years designing them.

A demonstration in front of 130 engineers

A while back, we presented a lecture to the Institute of Engineering and Technology, a sceptical crowd by nature. To make the point about where performance actually comes from, we set up two systems side by side.

System one: an Origin Live Calypso turntable and Illustrious tonearm with one of our tonearms, around £3,500 at the time of demo, fitted with a £400 cartridge.

System two: an entry-level Pro-ject Juke Box £200 turntable/tonearm combo fitted with the Lyra Atlas, an £8,000 reference cartridge.

Same record, same downstream electronics. The room was unanimous. The cheaper cartridge in a better tonearm and turntable sounded substantially better.

This isn’t an argument against good cartridges. The Atlas is a remarkable piece of engineering. It’s an argument about where in the vinyl playback chain your money does the most work.

The scale problem

To understand why, you have to grasp the scale at which a stylus operates, and how easily it can be interfered with.

A record groove is roughly 40 microns across, about the thickness of a human hair. Within that groove, the stylus is detecting movements as small as a micron at frequencies up to 40 kHz. The signal it produces is then amplified roughly 8,000 times before reaching your speakers.

A useful way to visualise this: imagine placing a supermarket carrier bag on top of Mount Everest, then magnifying the bag until it’s the size of the mountain. Any tiny crease, any minor imperfection in the bag is now reproduced at the scale of an entire geological feature.

That’s the amplification factor your tonearm operates inside. Any vibration, any flex, any unwanted movement the tonearm contributes gets magnified by the same 8,000 times the music does.

The cartridge should theoretically be able to produce a perfect transcription of the groove, but that is never the case. every unwanted vibration, whether that’s in the tube, the friction of the bearing or an unstable application of side bias produces vibration that interferes with the cartridge and the signal it is generating. This in turn results in smearing in the music you listen to.

Arm tubes as they vibrate and resonate, actually flex and move, which is bad news for the accurate tracking of a groove. Think about it this way:

The clock gauge on a fishing rod

In engineering we use a clock gauge, an instrument that measures distance in microns. Mounted on the most rigid mechanism it gives precise, repeatable readings.  In contrast mounting that gauge on the end of a fishing rod the readings become meaningless, because the fishing rod is too flexible. The gauge is still accurate. The reference point isn’t stable, and heres the kicker: in the worst case scenario, if the rod flexes and the in opposition to where the guage needs to be, the reading is zero.

A stylus is a mechanical instrument. The tonearm holds it steady. If the arm flexes, twists, or vibrates while the stylus reads the groove, the cartridge can’t tell which movements came from the record and which came from the arm. The signal is contaminated before it ever leaves the cartridge.

This is why rigidity is the first principle of tonearm design. When the stylus hits a sharp transient like the leading edge of a bass note, that energy tries to push the whole arm backwards. If the arm flexes even slightly, energy that should have become signal becomes flex, and you lose dynamics. Bass disappears first.

Resonance: the wrong measurement

Magazines often quote a tonearm’s resonant frequency, with an ideal around 10 Hz. The implication is that an arm with the “right” frequency is a good arm. This misses the more important measurement.

Every tonearm resonates. It’s a spectrum, but no material is genuinely rigid at this scale, not titanium, not carbon fibre, not the densest hardwood. The question isn’t whether your arm resonates. It’s how much it moves when it does.

Theoretically, an arm perfectly resonating would actually stay still  at its ends – in perfect resonance, no matter what the frequency, the cartridge would remain still. Of course, this isn’t how things work in practice, but the important thing to note is that resonance itself isn’t the issue. what matters is how great the amplitude reaching the position of your cartridge is.

We’d rather have an arm that resonates at an “imperfect” frequency but moves only a tiny amount, than one with a textbook 10 Hz resonance that flexes by a larger amplitude. The frequency is what reviewers measure. The amplitude is what your cartridge actually has to cope with.

Where the energy goes

When the stylus excites the arm, vibration travels down the tube toward the bearings and the counterweight. Most of it hits the counterweight at the back, and because the counterweight is heavy, some of that energy reflects straight back up the tube into the cartridge. The cartridge is trying to hold itself steady to read the groove. A reflected wave through its mount fights that effort and smears the signal.

The conventional fix is a single solid weight on the rear stub. We do something different. On our high-end arms from Illustrious up, we not only use a hollow mass-effective rear sleeve, but our counterweights are built from multiple layers of dissimilar materials, designed to absorb rather than reflect. Our current design uses 22 separate components and took years to develop. Multi-layer counterweights are now appearing on competing arms, usually a sign that an approach is working.

The materials trade-off

There is no perfect tonearm material. Titanium is rigid but rings at higher frequencies, giving beautiful midrange and treble but weak bass. Soft cast aluminium, used in many entry-level arms, rolls off the top end and loses dynamics. Carbon fibre is genuinely good and currently fashionable, but treated as a single-material solution, it doesn’t solve the underlying problem.

That problem is this: rigidity and damping fight each other. You want the arm rigid enough that the stylus reads cleanly. You also want it to dissipate vibrational energy quickly, so reflections don’t return to the cartridge. Add too much damping, and you lose some frequencies while others travel through and reflect back at different times, creating a timing smear you can hear in the music.

After thirty-plus years of experimentation, our conclusion is that no single material does it all. Our current arms use combinations of multi-layer tube construction, specialist coatings, and internal damping, because each frequency band responds best to a different solution. There is no magic material, only careful trade-offs handled at every level of the structure.

What this means for your system

The cartridge is not where most of the audible difference in vinyl playback lives. The tonearm and turntable are. If you’re upgrading a system and your budget is finite, the tonearm is almost always where the next pound is best spent. It’s the unfashionable answer, but its the honest one.