Who recalls those 70's era TTs with the pivoting cartridles? The arm had a linkage system that would change the angle of the stylus so that it remained square to the groove no matter where the arm was (outer edge or at center).

I recall that Lafayette Radio Electronics used to make a big stink about them, can't quite remember the brand but am thinking that perhaps Garrard made a version.

In theory it sounds great but I suspect that in reality they didn't quite work (binding pivots, improper engineering or assembled parts, plain old damage from bending or wear/dirt). Comments anyone?

Anthony

Like this one (http://www.tnt-audio.com/sorgenti/garrarde.html)?

IIRC, the mechanism actually worked quite well, but added a bit of mass to the tonearm. Still reasonably well regarded, but not worth shelling out a lot of cash for (<$150).

Yep! But while these were sold as being the cat's jammies, I doubt they were really sold to the real audiophiles but the typical person who thought this would be the latest and greatest.

Perhaps there was a cheaper version of this brand? They weren't exactly giving these away, but they certainly weren't in the Revco sort of range either. At the time I thought it was a great idea to eliminate groove wear and to lengthen stylus life (if nothing else) but I was just a teenager so what did I know? ;) Thanks for the link.

Anthony

As far as I can recall, this was the only TT/Arm with such a design. Except for perhaps the Dynavector arm, which came out in the early '80s and was way more expensive.


The 100 was not the top of the line for Garrard IIRC.

My local shop has one of these on the shelves. I have been considering it for fun factor. But at 100 bucks, it may be too much fun for me;)

Garrard actually had two models. The first one was the Zero 100c and the replacement model was the Zero 2000. The only problem was that the arm was pretty massive, which made it bounce a bit on warped records.

... The Garrard zero 100, B, and C's arms represented a good idea (the "zero tracking error" pantograph tonearm) with two fatal flaws IMO: lots of moving parts (i.e., lots of friction, or at least hysteresis) and lots of parts (i.e., lots of moving mass). Some or all of the Garrard arms tried to compensate for the latter by making the arms out of magnesium (keep AWAY from open flame...)

FWIW, I had an original zero 100 in the basement for a while sans the slide-in headshell insert for the cartridge. Gave it away, with an old ELAC Miracord changer, as a gag "Yankee swap" gift a while back. I live in fear of its returning :-)

Sort of on this subject, I use a bang & olufsen TX-2 with a servo-driven tangential arm, and I think it tracks better (in terms of distortion, especially near the end of the disc) than any swinging-arm tt I've owned. The important caveat here is that I've never been able to afford a GOOD swinging arm! :-) The TX-2 was only seven bucks...