I owe all who have participated in this thread an apology to the extent that this territory has been plowed before and perhaps I should have done a search
http://www.whatsbestforum.com/showthread.php?9295-Oh-no-MF-is-not-a-fan-of-12-quot-arms!
That said, I see that there is no scientifically convincing answer. I think it is safe to say that no arm design, even tangential arms, are perfect. From there, we can perhaps agree that 9" arms can be engineered to be incredibly good but so can 12" arms. I believe that Mikey is wrong to imply that the best 9" arms are inherently superior to otherwise equivalently designed 12" arms. Am I the only one to notice that Mikey is anti-resonance in every way when it comes to his choice of loudspeakers (Wilson) and electronics (solid state) and his beloved (if not outdated) Continuum Caliburn deck sports an 84 lb platter on several hundred pound plinth and stand and in that regard hales from the same camp as his engineer editor, JA, and yet he loves and champions the most resonant of all playback technologies? In that regard, he is a self-conflicted enigma. I have always noticed that while he has great ears, great writing ability, and knows a ton about table set-up, he is neither formally trained nor even demonstrates much of an innate understanding of engineering. He is prone to repeating design and engineering aspects that were told to him or that he has read pertaining to whatever he happens to be reviewing at the time. And most important of all, for better or worse he is a listener who dissects, describes and rates products based upon all of the well-worn audiophile categories of performance rather than the overall gestalt of sound. Whereas Art Dudley and Herb Reichert listen for "the big picture", Mikey takes a magnifying glass to the music and gets out a set of tweezers. Let me know if I am mistaken, but I don't think Mr. Fremer has ever sung the praises of SPU's for example. Why is this relevant? Well, in my estimation 12" arms and SPU's are capable of producing incredibly intoxicating renditions of real music rather than renditions that satisfy all the audiophile blather that Mikey finds so attractive. Mr. Fremer's move from Sonus Faber Stradivari to Wilsons and from the tubed Manley Steelhead to uber-priced solid state Ypsilon is symbolic.