From an engineering perspective, we believe that there is a hierarchy of importance in any record playing system. The transducers at either end (the cartridge and the speakers) have the most obvious impact. Each of those can imprint it's own signature on the overall perceived sound very easily, and are the ones most affected by external factors. They are the components most likely to be a matter of personal preference.

The tonearm's job at first glance appears simple. It's just there to hold the cartridge in the correct place as it transcribes a predefined arc across your record, right? Well, yes and no... Aside from complexities such as its effective mass interacting with the compliance of the pickup cartridge, there is the seldom mentioned issue of resonance, aside from resonance due to the aformentioned mass / compliance relationship. There is the resonance of materials used in the tonearm construction, the bearings, appendages such as fingerlifts, material / material boundarys etc which, when excited by the energy from the record groove can add / subtract or generally blur the information from the groove as it travels through the arm construction and back again to the cartridge. There is some novel experimental data out there, related to tonearms, and we have taken this data into account when producing our designs.