TBH, as an old turntable engineer I have been absolutely astonished by this thread. I suppose it proves the addage "the only thing we learn from experience is that people don't learn from experience".
There is sound information in the thread but some real inaccurate dross too. Here is a little summary of 40+ year old engineering data.
Firstly all off set arms will generate an inward torque due to stylus drag.
This will lead to more force on one groove wall than the other.
The magnitude of this force will vary with the following:
Groove modulation.
RPM (45 more than 33)
Stylus profile.
Vertical tracking force.
Arm geometry.
This force is not constant, both from arm design to design, different stylus profiles and over the surface of the record, varying from outer to inner section of the spiral groove (how many grooves are there on a record? 2) and with the loudness of the music.
This means that the setting is always a compromise, unless a tangential arm is used, and most of them have other different shortcomings.
Conventionally, at least when I was working on record player design in the 1970s, anti skate was considered to be best set for the maximum modulation. The logic behind this is that, whilst the skate torque is always there and varying, the only time it will actually result in mistracking and resultant groove damage is on the most heavily modulated passages. This setting was commonly used. It does have the effect of being greater than optimum on light modulation, but overall, since the skate torque is varying all the time, a pivoted arm with offset can never have complete and perfect compensation. Using this upper figure is logically the best compromise since it is perfect in the condition where groove damage is a risk, and is still better than nothing all the rest of the time.
The normal way to set this is with a heavily modulated test record and an oscilloscope. A groove free section of disc is useless for this for at least 2 reasons, firstly the bit of the stylus in contact is not that which touches the groove, so the drag force will be wrong, secondly no modulation so, again, the stylus drag is wrong. I thought this method had been discredited for these reasons since the 1970s btw.
If one is not concerned by groove damage, but more so about the sensing parts of the cartridge being in the most linear part of the magnetic circuit, then a reduced anti-skating force could be used.
No anti-skate has no virtues whatsoever, apart from making the arm much cheaper to design and make.
There are DJ decks with straight arms which require no anti skate, but they run huge offset angle errors.
Basically this is just one of the many compromised one has to balance in a record playing system! There is no record player solution which is "no-compromise" and never can be
There is sound information in the thread but some real inaccurate dross too. Here is a little summary of 40+ year old engineering data.
Firstly all off set arms will generate an inward torque due to stylus drag.
This will lead to more force on one groove wall than the other.
The magnitude of this force will vary with the following:
Groove modulation.
RPM (45 more than 33)
Stylus profile.
Vertical tracking force.
Arm geometry.
This force is not constant, both from arm design to design, different stylus profiles and over the surface of the record, varying from outer to inner section of the spiral groove (how many grooves are there on a record? 2) and with the loudness of the music.
This means that the setting is always a compromise, unless a tangential arm is used, and most of them have other different shortcomings.
Conventionally, at least when I was working on record player design in the 1970s, anti skate was considered to be best set for the maximum modulation. The logic behind this is that, whilst the skate torque is always there and varying, the only time it will actually result in mistracking and resultant groove damage is on the most heavily modulated passages. This setting was commonly used. It does have the effect of being greater than optimum on light modulation, but overall, since the skate torque is varying all the time, a pivoted arm with offset can never have complete and perfect compensation. Using this upper figure is logically the best compromise since it is perfect in the condition where groove damage is a risk, and is still better than nothing all the rest of the time.
The normal way to set this is with a heavily modulated test record and an oscilloscope. A groove free section of disc is useless for this for at least 2 reasons, firstly the bit of the stylus in contact is not that which touches the groove, so the drag force will be wrong, secondly no modulation so, again, the stylus drag is wrong. I thought this method had been discredited for these reasons since the 1970s btw.
If one is not concerned by groove damage, but more so about the sensing parts of the cartridge being in the most linear part of the magnetic circuit, then a reduced anti-skating force could be used.
No anti-skate has no virtues whatsoever, apart from making the arm much cheaper to design and make.
There are DJ decks with straight arms which require no anti skate, but they run huge offset angle errors.
Basically this is just one of the many compromised one has to balance in a record playing system! There is no record player solution which is "no-compromise" and never can be