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As Huber describes it, the design "reduces the perfectly tangential tracking to pivot points, while the pick-up cartridge is taken and aligned on the Thales Circle." You can examine the geometry via Huber's explanation and an interactive animation.īasing a tonearm on the Thales Circle is said by Huber to produce four things: zero tracking error (which is difficult to prove in any way other than the mathematical) minimal friction using traditional pivoted bearings a short tonearm with little resonance and symmetrical inertia at the tracking point in all axes.
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The arm's geometrical basis is the Thales Circle (footnote 1). He was granted a Swiss patent for the design in 2004. I think the amount of distortion added by a properly set up and well-designed pivoted arm is lower than what's added by the rest of a typical audio system.ĭesigned and manufactured by Micha Huber, a fastidious young Swiss mechanical engineer, musician, and watchmaker, the HiFiction Thales AV tonearm ($12,360) offers the promise of a tonearm boasting the advantages of both pivoted and linear tangential-tracking arms, and the disadvantages of neither. But by then I couldn't justify to myself the hassles and tradeoffs inherent in any so-called tangential-tracking arm. Rockport's Andy Payor eventually redesigned the 6000, changing its effective vertical mass to get the arm's resonant frequency within the optimal range.