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Souther linear arm

Pio1980

Pio1980

AK Member
Anyone else using the earlier dual-beam arm? I've modified mine to eliminate the powerful LF resonance and discussed it with Lou Souther before the Tri-Quartz/Tri-Beam came out. I don't know if the 3rd rod fixed the resonance as he thought it would or just moved it up some as I lost contact with him and the community when transferred back to Germany in the mid-'80s. I've also glass bead-damped it's hollow stainless steel "swizzle-straw" arm tube which audibly smoothed the mid-to-upper end response considerably.
Lou's since sold the company to Peter Suchy at Clearaudio in Germany quite a while back and I think passed on.

The modified SLA-3 is still doing fine service on a DENON DP-55K, carrying a 20 year old Ortofon X3-MC with too much time on it's line contact stylus.
S.B.
 
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I have a Souther Tri-Quartz. I am using a sub and have never heard a LF resonance. Is it an interaction with the table?

I am also using the solid arm, not the hollow one. I have both.

And there is also another poster here (can't remember the moniker) who has a more recent Souther, I'd guess just before selling to Suchy.
 
They tended to be particularly microphonic off the cabling with a pronounced boominess to the resonance while cued up & playing. The later 3rd beam may have cured it or just moved the rez point up a ways. Dunno. Cue it on a still record and tap the cables coming off the terminal block to see.

I found the solid arm just as ring-y in it's way as was the hollow arm. Loosely filling the hollow arm tube with the glass beads used in dental instrument chairside hot-bead sterilizers damped the thing grave-yard dead. Borrowed the idea from Bill Firebaugh's sand-filled "Well-Tempered Arm".
S.B.
 
The Tri-Quartz has the third beam. I have never heard this resonance from my arm nor the ring-y sounds.

I just went down the hall to check the cabling and wire. There is no sound when tapping the Litz wire feeding the cartridge. I should mention, I have used the Cardas/Incognito/Rega upgrade wire for my arm.

I have had 3 cartridges on the arm and the arm on two different tables. They have been in 3 rooms over the years.
 
The problem with the older arm related to the cabling from the terminal block to the preamp being a source/route for LF microphonics to the arm-cart when cued onto a record, the arm's structure resonance amplifying it tremendously. Tap there near the block when cued in a still record.
As far as the arm itself, I think the damped tube would be superior to the solid rod. It seems so in mine & I think this should be true of any of the Souther SLA set-ups. I never discussed that wih Lou after he sent me the spare different arms, the damping came after I lost contact with him.
Is the cart wiring upgrade still available, the original is rather specific and fragile and it's demise could retire the arm.
S.B.
 
Just a guess here, you are not familiar with the Cardas/Incognito/Rega arm wire upgrade. It is a continuous run of Litz wire from the cartridge clips to the RCA plugs. The wiring becomes encased in a pair of shielded cases about 8" back from the cartridge clips. That shield is attached to the outer shell of the RCA plugs. There is no terminal block on mine. And, yes, the arm wiring is still available. I see it on eBay fairly often. Just search for Incognito.

Pio1980 said:
The problem with the older arm related to the cabling from the terminal block to the preamp being a source/route for LF microphonics to the arm-cart when cued onto a record, the arm's structure resonance amplifying it tremendously. Tap there near the block when cued in a still record.

As far as the arm itself, I think the damped tube would be superior to the solid rod. It seems so in mine & I think this should be true of any of the Souther SLA set-ups. I never discussed that with Lou after he sent me the spare different arms, the damping came after I lost contact with him.

Is the cart wiring upgrade still available, the original is rather specific and fragile and it's demise could retire the arm.
S.B.
Click to expand...

My arm is newer than yours. Maybe that is why it doesn't exhibit this problem. I can say that definitively.
 
HI,
I have no wish to hurt your feelings. But I feel obligated to inject a dissonant note. In my opinion Southers, in any form, are a symphony of resonances. There are many reasons why I dislike the design but the resonances are primary.

This arm is just a bad idea. Sorry. I do think they look kind of neat.

Sparky
 
Why not. Everyone has one. And I'm sure you owned 3 or four.

Seriously, maybe you had a friend with one in his system and didn't like it. But do you really have ownership knowledge?????
 
Karma16 said:
HI,
I have no wish to hurt your feelings. But I feel obligated to inject a dissonant note. In my opinion Southers, in any form, are a symphony of resonances. There are many reasons why I dislike the design but the resonances are primary.

This arm is just a bad idea. Sorry. I do think they look kind of neat.

Sparky
Click to expand...

The earlier dual beam arms, yes, they had problems. The dust cover has to come off for starters, the boomy LF resonance that I cured with the mod involving two .38 cal copper-jacket slugs as a floating internally-contained damper-coupled countermass, and the glass-bead arm tube damping. The rest is pretty stable IMO. It tracks like nothing else I know properly set up. They have a certain elegant simplicity compared to other linear arms and I consider it the first linear arm taking a general-mount catridge that worked. Better other linear arms followed them but they came with their own problems as well, it's all a tradeoff of priorities, practicality and cost. The Souther system just works and was a well-prioritized compromise for what it is and does. It's not the best choice for a cart needing a relatively high inertially non-reactive backing mass.
S.B.
 
"Just a guess here, you are not familiar with the Cardas/Incognito/Rega arm wire upgrade. It is a continuous run of Litz wire from the cartridge clips to the RCA plugs. The wiring becomes encased in a pair of shielded cases about 8" back from the cartridge clips. That shield is attached to the outer shell of the RCA plugs. There is no terminal block on mine. And, yes, the arm wiring is still available."

Nope, not familiar with it.
Would it be possible to see a pic of how that is arranged on your arm/T-T?
TIA! Steve B.
 
Grainger49 said:
Why not. Everyone has one. And I'm sure you owned 3 or four.

Seriously, maybe you had a friend with one in his system and didn't like it. But do you really have ownership knowledge?????
Click to expand...

HI,
Wrong, I worked on Souther's professionally, both doing raw installs and keeping my customers systems tuned up. The more I was exposed to them in different systems, the more I thought they were a kludge. They hurt my ears.

And you are wrong about the Souther being the first tangential arm that worked. It is the first non-servo tangential arm that KIND OF worked. But there are many servo type arms that vastly outperformed the Souther. But air bearing arms really work. I have owned examples of the various tangential types.

In order of performance:
1. Air bearing (the best, by far; I currently own an Eminent Technology ET-2).
2. Good (means expensive) servo driven arms (B&O, Yamaha, etc.). Don't bother with the cheap ones. They are junk.
3. Passive tangential arms (Souther, Marantz, others?). It's amazing they work at all. I would far prefer to have a top line pivoted arm. In fact I do have a Graham 2.2 Deluxe on my second turntable. A very fine arm, indeed.

Sparky
 
Sparky, you have some lovely stuff, honestly!
My system was/is by necessity a comromise re enviremental considerations, later, cost. I was a single career GI and the digs had varying degrees of floor stability, ruling out suspended T/Ts and pivoted arms of any mass. I still have that super-stable Denon DP-55K/Souther system that I put together some 25 yrs ago and it is still paid for.
My perception is still "High-end" but my fixed income certainly isn't and that puts a crimp on how far I can go with how much, which is not much & not very far these days. Being particularly sensitive to attrition-induced stylus tracing error limits me to ca 60-75 hours on a stylus befor it becomes unpleasant to audition. That makes a really great cart pretty much senseless cost-per-hour wise. Pity I can hear and appreciate the diff between good and great, but a great cart with flats just starting to wear into the stylus is pointless and useless to me. I'd much rather a fresh good cart without the distortion. My present cart is an O'fon X3-MC begging for a re-tip, so it doesn't get played anymore. An upgrade re-tip from Soundsmith is way past the household budget for the nonce.

Having said that, your perspective is understood and appreciated! I've conversed with very few people other than Lou Souther and the Atlanta dealer about this thing.
Best regards; Steve B.
 
Nope, not familiar with it.
Would it be possible to see a pic of how that is arranged on your arm/T-T?
TIA! Steve B.
Click to expand...

I'll take a picture sometime over the weekend. It isn't real pretty, discarded the dust cover years ago, it made things bind, but it all works extremely well. I just clean the rods every year or so and it never skips.

(Why can't the guys at Harry Pearson's get it to work without it being set up downhill?)

And was the Atlanta dealer Julian? (an old friend)
 
Grainger49 said:
I'll take a picture sometime over the weekend. It isn't real pretty, discarded the dust cover years ago, it made things bind, but it all works extremely well. I just clean the rods every year or so and it never skips.

(Why can't the guys at Harry Pearson's get it to work without it being set up downhill?)

And was the Atlanta dealer Julian? (an old friend)
Click to expand...


Yes, it was Julian Scharfman, good times after hours at the shop in the upstairs room and also auditioning the SA-4s & the Dayton-Wright gasbags at his home. You know Sam P. too I assume. Been out of contact w'them for well over a decade now. I demonstrated the coax cable-induced distortion problem to them back in the early '80s by subbing the prime system hook-ups with 18 ga zip cord on cheap RCA connectors. Needless to say they went on a cable quest & revamped the entire shop. I still have trouble convincing folks coax (where the return is via the shield) doesn't belong in an audio chain.
Did you know or meet John Fuselier, he built the 3-way pulse-perfect speakers I still use. I was one of the field testers for the design, Tony Cordesman the other. Still a fab competitive compact nearly-full-range tower speaker. John suggested the Souther and intro'ed him to me.
Harry Pearson still around? I've been out of the communiy for nearly 2 decades now. I remember meeting him in Atlanta ca 20-odd years ago.
I got around pretty good for an active duty GI with a not-too-bad ear.

HP playing it "downhill"? cruddy rails or sticky bearings I'd guess. No such problem here.

Thnx on the pix, interested in routing and mechanical termination of the pillar plug on the cabling. If you want to do some additional tweaking try the glass bead damping in the hollow tube arm. You can use highway paint reflector beads or PM me for some of the larger sterilizer beads. It needs to be loosely filled and plugged with a bit of cotton or fibrefill fluff or whatever allows them to float slightly. It'll damp the entire carrriage along with the arm.
Best! Steve
 
Hi,
I have a Souther SLA-3 stored away that I've not used since my son was born. Life got in the way and it still sits boxed up in my VPI table atop of the Lead Balloon TT base waiting for resrrection. It is a beautiful arm. I just love the way it looks. The theory behind its operation was simple and elegant. Setting up was simple and easy. You just need to patient and careful. It can be adjusted to perform very well.

I damped some of its resonance by using the solid titanium arm tube, and replacing the thin plastic top cover with a thick acrylic one. I drilled a hole through each of the 2 stainless steel crossbeam tubes that connects the two molded plastic ends and filled them with lead shots. I also filled with lead the two steel tubes that connects the arm to the base. As a final act of audio nervosa, I added a thin layer of BluTac on the thin metal that the two quartz rods were glued on. I later removed the Tac because it was funky looking. My arm was much heavier and non resonant. When I tested the arm with the stylus resting on a non moving record and tapped the arm(body, tube, cover) gently, I got a quick 'thunk' out of the speakers and no ringing like before the mod. I plan on getting my Souther/VPI up and running soon but first I want to make an interconnect using very fine litz wires that runs from the cartridge clips to RCA plugs. Percy sells a very fine litz, but I hear it's a tough product to work with. http://www.audioasylum.com/scripts/t.pl?f=vinyl&m=250390

I noticed that the new Clearaudio version of the Souther does not use the spindle as a support for the arm. The arm now hovers over the record spindle and is supported on the plinth end. I was wondering if any of you SLA-3 Souther users tried this. This modification seems to be a good idea since this would isolate the arm from possible sources of noise; friction between the delrin bearing surface on the arm and spindle, and noise transmitted from the record, bearing, etc. Let me know about your mods, opinions about this fine arm.
Regards.
David
 
I've had two Souther's, pre Triquartz on a SOTA and Triquartz on a VPI HW-19, and both worked and sounded fine. Very staight forward to install and set-up once you knew how, but always very time consuming requiring the patience of Job. Once set-up they stayed set-up. Had an ETII on the VPI after the Triquartz and consider them both to be top TAs.

Spindle locator is not a problem unless the spindle top is poorly polished. SOTA stopped polishing their spindle tops because so many people were putting Southers on the table instead of Sumikos. This caused a lot of noise until the spindle top was polished.
 
Hi T/T (is that moniker for your son's age bracket)?

I like the Souther a lot. While I agree with Sparky that the E-T should be a much better arm esp for a good M/C, it has it's own housekeeping issues re tweaking, hygeine, & the pressure pump. The Souther is simpler, self-contained and a more suitable mount for hi-compliance carts IMO. Most good carts these days are medium compliance so they may lose something in impact in the Souther compared to higher mass arm like the E-T, Graham, and other modern pivioted high-end arms. The Souther is definitely mechanically less stable on a micro level than the good pivoted arms and the good air-bearing linears. However it is a pretty good solution for a time when the only other contemporary option, the B&O LT, stuck you with a player & cartridge with no real opportunity for improvements take-it-or-leave-it, and it still works well today.

The mods I described are pretty much it for now, aside from putting in felt stops that restrict the movement of the arm to groove area to unstress the cabling and conveniently re-set the cart to the lead-in area when raised. I also removed the magnetic EOP lift as a pretty bad idea.
The floating mass LF damping was less stressful to the structure in theory than lead shot fill of the tubing and effectively took care of the problem so I went with that. The spindle supports all the added weight which was not much. I still think the bead-filled hollow tube arm is the ideal solution to that part of the thing, the solid arm didn't seem to really do that much for it. The Souther seems to get a great deal out of a pick-up's potential and extracting the content of the recording, beginning to end of disc. I like it's realtive immunity to floor motion, compared to more massive and pivoted arms, and it's relative simplicity of use (with the stops) makes it basiclally a model of simple use.

I know what a prime SOTA system with a great vacuum platter T-T, arm & cart combo, electronix & speakers should be capable of doing on really fine source material. I have not heard anything even pretending to aspire to that standard in a couple decades and my set-up gives but a hint of what is to be had from a full-out set-up with a factory fresh stylus tip (there is nothing more pathetic that a T-O-T-L cart, or any cart for that matter, with perceptable attrition-induced tracing distortion to my ears) in a really good venue.

I don't know much about the Clearaudio arms. I do know that Lou's spindle pillar support automatically precisely located and stabilized the assembly for set-up and each playing thereafter. The only real problem I saw in it was the torsional resonance that it originated with which the floating-mass damping helped the dual beam gantry. I never heard any rumble or other background noise out of it on my Denon DP-55K.

S.B.
 
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Hi S.B.,
Could you explain your mod for the Souther arm:"the mod involving two .38 cal copper-jacket slugs as a floating internally-contained damper-coupled countermass." I can't seem to visualize what's going on here. Thanks,
David

PS My son has always had a gentle soul even when he was a child of two. Terrible T is a title of one of Lee Morgan's compositions on VeeJay "here's Lee Morgan"
 
Sure thing!
The endpieces were symmetrical on the main structure, so the vertical rail guide holes and threaded heigth adjuster hole between them are there, unused in the spindle end piece. I have 2 of the slugs tip-to-tip in the hole fartherest from the spindle with a felt-padded flat acrylic beam loosely screw affixed underneath, holding them in place with an additional felt pad & plastic washer between the nylon fulcrum screw and the beam. A loose cork plug affixed to the beam centers and secures the plexi beam on the other unused rail hole. The slugs provide the floating mass, the padded beam the counter-lever and damping.
S.B.
 
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