Paging Dr. Löfgren

It started one evening when I was killing time watching YouTube videos and stumbled across a 2017 talk given by Jonathan Carr, Lyra's brilliant cartridge designer.'

-  MICHAEL TREI

After discussing his design and Lyra's manufacturing processes for about 18 minutes, Carr opens the floor to questions. Someone asks which of the many cartridge setup parameters he feels is the most important. I was floored when the first thing Carr said was that "horizontal tracking error is not very important at all." What? I couldn't believe I was hearing this from the guy who writes owner's manuals with super-specific specifications, like tracking force measured to a 100th of a gram and loading recommendations with wide but oddly specific ranges like 97.6 to 806 ohms. Did he really believe that the tonearm geometry calculations of Löfgren, Stevenson, et al, weren't such a big deal?

For decades I have painstakingly used the best tools available to perfect these settings with every cartridge I install; now a guy whose opinion I respect deeply is saying it's not very important.

Carr went on to explain how pretty much every tonearm aligns the cartridge with an overhang and offset angle to minimize the tracking angle error, but that this also results in an undesirable skating force, which needs to be counteracted with some kind of antiskating device on the tonearm. His belief is that the counteracting skating and antiskating forces rob the cartridge of some of its energy and dynamics, resulting in sound that's less lively and engaging than it could be. Carr then spoke about how some audiophiles, especially in Japan, embrace the use of what's known as a pure straight tonearm, with no offset angle, thereby minimizing the skating force and the associated need to use antiskating. But this approach comes with a price.