Ar XA tonearm vs XB

[02County]

I have an AR XB. The original tonearm has issues. Can I replace it with a tonearm from an AR XA? My reading suggests the vertical support post is longer on the XB but I’m not so sure

 

[AdamAnt316]

I don't know for sure, but if the support post is indeed longer, that'll affect VTA, at the very least. The XA tonearm is also fundamentally different in that it was 'damped' in order to prevent the arm from accidentally being dropped on the record, while the XB's arm did away with that due to the presence of a cueing lever. If you have the parts, you might need to swap over the 'well' that the XA arm's support post goes into to solve the VTA difference, but once that's done, I can't see a reason why the XA arm wouldn't work with the XB.

What's wrong with the tonearm in the XB you have, anyway? There generally isn't a whole lot that can go wrong with these (well, except for things involving the headshell, anyway, but XA arms have that issue as well), so whatever's going on shouldn't be too hard to fix, methinks. Anyway, good luck!
-Adam

 

[Wes_in_VA]

Calling @marcmorin ...

 

[marcmorin]

The XA arm will not fit the XB, if the XA arm has the XA pivot block. later model XA's shared the same pivot block as the XB. where another issue is that may show up is the pivot post length, for some unknown reason AR had 4 different length ones, not including the XB77 pivot post.