The AR Tonearm

About the The AR Tonearm

The AR tbl-arm is a tonearm developed by Acoustic Research for use with their AR Turntable introduced in 1984. It has an effective mass of 13 grams without cartridge and exhibits very low pivot friction, less than 20 mg horizontally or vertically. The arm includes an anti-skating control calibrated to balance side-thrust on the stylus, with an indicated vertical tracking force accurate within 0.1 gram. The tonearm cable is captive and looped to minimize vibration transmission to the floating subchassis, with a measured cable capacitance of only 82 pF per channel. The arm is well damped, with infrasonic resonance at 7.5 Hz peaking at only 8 dB, indicating good control of tonearm/cartridge resonance. The vertical pivots are positioned nearly a half-inch above the record surface, which may cause some warp wow on imperfect records. The tonearm was available as an option with the AR Turntable, which was a belt-drive design with a 24-pole synchronous motor and a 1.8 kg platter, praised for its articulate sound and good timing.