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LouisF

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I read the following in the latest edition of The Absolute Sound:
"I first became hooked on high-end audio in the late Sixties, by
which time bias compensation had become pretty common. However,
the turntable I purchased then and used for well over a decade
was an Acoustic Research XA, the integral arm of which had
no antiskating device. Edgar Villchur, its designer, argued that any
mistracking owing to bias is easily addressed by a modest 10-15%
increase in tracking force, which is certainly born out in my own
experience. I used a Shure M91E pickup?a popular combination
back then?and I almost never heard any mistracking. Indeed, that
Shure/AR combination could out-track many far fancier and more
expensive setups, while the pretty rare LPs that it couldn?t track
couldn?t be tracked by any other arms I knew of either. (I own and
still listen to an XA, fitted with a Shure V15xMR pickup, and it
sounds wonderful and tracks for all intents and purposes flawlessly.)
In the decades since, every arm I purchased had bias compensation,
and I used it, mostly because it was available, not because
I could absolutely demonstrate that it was better. To wit: About
a year ago I somehow lost one of the tiny rubber grommets that
keep the loop of the anti-skating thread in the proper indented ring
on the outrigger of the Basis Vector IV arm. So I just removed the
thread and used the arm sans antiskating. The result? I?d have to lie
to say I heard any difference either in the reproduction as such or in
the truly superlative tracking with my reference Ortofon Windfeld,
nor have I increased tracking force." - p72, TAS 284.

What do you guys make of that? I have always adjusted bias compensation because I prefer that to increasing tracking firce, which I believe was detrimental to the longevity of my stylus and records. Now this gentleman says it is not even necessary to increase VTF. Have anyone tested that?
 

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