Anti Skating Vinyl. The feature prevents your tonearm from skating across your vinyl records and causing an unpleasant sound quality when you play the record. Most of our beloved tables have an pivoting arm on the top right side. Due to the offset between the cartridge s axis which is approximately tangential to the disc and the tonearm s pivot the force applied through friction by the rotating disc to the cartridge tends to draw the tonearm toward the center of the record and distort the balance of the sound and.
Most turntables include this features. Get it badly wrong and you risk having the stylus jumping around like a kid on a trampoline adding wear and tear on the grooves themselves.
Anti skate affects the tracking ability of your stylus how well the needle is able to move across your records.
The photo at the head of this piece shows a vpi arm with this system and the back of an sme arm that uses a counterweight anti skate. The fact that a record player doesn t come with an anti skate knob doesn t imply that the turntable will. Having your anti skating set up correctly will. Get it badly wrong and you risk having the stylus jumping around like a kid on a trampoline adding wear and tear on the grooves themselves.
