The original TP16 arm is all-right with a mono cartridge but I was wanting to upgrade the cartridge at some point and doing that only makes sense with a better tonearm. I've been modifying this Thorens TD160 Mk1 for some time and have upgraded the overall sound by a noticeable margin. Looking at an alignment tool, there's little margin of error when aligning the stylus so adding or subtracting an inch to the tonearm may make a difference or maybe not? An inch seems like a small adjustment where it pertains to making a mounting plate and installing a tonearm but a lot where it pertains to the cartridge alignment and getting good tracking along with a fluid sonic signature. It seems that setting up a cartridge is as much an art as it is a science. My questioning stems from choosing to use or not to use anti-skate.

If you're obsessed with minimizing TAE across the surface of an LP, then you might opt for a 12-inch overhung tonearm (with the attendant increase in effective mass and greater propensity for resonance), or a linear tracker. What I was thinking is that the very large amounts of TAE that result if you use a 7-inch underhung tonearm like the Viv are drastically reduced if you use the 14-inch version.

Of course TAE for overhung tonearms is also proportional to length, which accounts for the existence of 12' tonearms. Thus some choose 10 or 10.5 as a compromise. And I do NOT agree that 12” tonearms are inherently superior to 9” tonearms “in every way”. I think Nandric nailed it some TTs simply do not fit 9” tonearms, so there is a market for 10 and 10.5 tonearms for those TTs. Underhung tonearms generate much more tracking angle error than overhung tonearms, which error is directly proportional to length. Viv is an underhung tonearm, entirely different from Kuzma or nearly all others, that overhang the spindle. Viv also make 9” and longer versions of their tonearm, all the way to 14”.

Sme tonearm length