Sme tonearm adjust bias anti skate
But others exist to tantalize completists. Collectors know the SME enjoyed numerous variants, especially the inch model. Two counterweights were available, of 64g and 77g, allowing the use of very heavy cartridges, up to SME employed a hanging weight on a thread to set adjustable bias corresponding with tracking force, via notches on a rail.Īll of the arms were fitted with damped cueing devices, and VTA was easily set thanks to the adjustable arm height. Precision is such that accurate tracking force up to 1. All of the same basic family ran for the next 30 years.
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#SME TONEARM ADJUST BIAS ANTI SKATE SERIES#
The Series II stayed in production for 10 years. Instead of a steel arm tube, the Series II used a polished, bright-anodised aluminium arm tube, 9. I recall going into the small tool room and asking if we had any aluminium tube. SME TurntablesĪt that time, the Scale Model Equipment Co Ltd, as SME was then titled, had a useful precision-engineering capability built up over the preceding 12 years. It came about because my burgeoning interest in hi-fi had reached the point where I was dissatisfied with what the market offered. Robertson-Aikman, above all an engineer, was also a music lover able to construct his own system. Even the near-elliptical tonearm cut-out served as the default arm aperture for countless manufacturers that supplied armless decks, from Garrard to Thorens to Technics.įounded in by Robertson-Aikman, SME made scale models and parts for the model-engineering trade and hobbyist model builder. The SME was, and is, the most popular and influential quality tonearm in history. After four decades, total sales neared a half-million units. Robertson-Aikman felt the more affordable M2 was its true successor. It stayed in production untilbut not because the superior Series V supplanted it both models ran concurrently for almost 20 years. Due to his unfailing honesty and integrity, SME founder Alastair Robertson-Aikman found it mildly disconcerting that the headshell-mounting system became known colloquially as the SME mount Ortofon deserved the credit. Moreover, the first headshells used with the -prior to the arrival of the familiar, drilled-out SME design-were Ortofon shells with SME badges on the front. Indeed, many audiophiles still swear by it, and with good reason: Despite it being associated, in the minds of many, with high-compliance moving-magnet cartridges because of strong associations with Shure, it was, in fact, designed with the then-dominant, heavy, low-compliance Ortofon moving-coil cartridges in the SPU series.
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Depending on when you start the counting, last year marked the 50th anniversary of the SME tonearm.