Tonearm tweak -- question for Marco

[alphaGT]

A ball and socket unipivot bearing. The arm carrying the socket and the arm stem has the ball (a hemisphere would be adequate). Air being pumped through the stem to the ball, which would have mulitple fine drillings to distribute air around the ball surface, providing a thin 'cushion' within the socket. Much as is done longitudinally with an air bearing linear tracker.

I see what you're getting at. A good visualization, and sounds very feasible. The ball and socket could even be reversed? With the ball on the arm, and the socket with tiny holes to levitate the ball. I'm not sure what difference it makes? But it could go either way. I had an idea of balancing arms, like a tight rope walker, that would reach below the pivotal center with weights, you could screw up and down to adjust the azimuth. An idea I had for a standard unipivot, I do enjoy looking at all of the many tonearm designs, to see how different engineers approach the same problems.


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[walpurgis]

The French turntable company ERA had interesting ideas regarding tonearms. Worth a look.

[Barry]

All it's doing is increasing the effective arm mass in the horizontal plane with virtually no increase in effective mass in the vertical plane.

[Frazeur1]

Or buy a Well Tempered and get rid of the bearings and all for the most part(A Decca probably wouldn't work on a WT anyway, maybe?). But what would be the fun in that? Air bearings are an interesting thing, but as Geoff has mentioned, they also bring about their own issues, and generally not cheap. Fun stuff though!