Taken from my post on another board... I'm personally against Vestax's approach to marketing their straight-arm tables. There are a number of house (non-turntablist) DJ's that have experience accelerated record wear caused by the ASTS tonearm design.
---snip
Your Vestax straight-arm turntable *is* damaging your records. When Vestax rolled-out the ASTS tonearm design a few years ago, it was being marketed to the turntablist/hip hop segment.
The problem with their table lies in the fact that the cartridge has NO overhang. Think of the last non-DJ straight-arm table you used. Remember how the cartridge was angled a few degrees inward? Recall how it was fairly long? That's overhang. Most tonearms feature some degree of overhang. This creates an inward force (towards the spindle) that is mostly (90%) corrected by the anti-skating adjustment, which applies a force that counters the natural tendency of the tonearm to gravitate towards the spindle during record play. Try it with a blank record. The force is doubled and points AWAY from the spindle during backcueing and scratching, so turn antiskating to ZERO on your Technics when you scratch. An S-shaped arm and a straight-arm of the same logical length/overhang will perform similarly.
The Vestax arm is short, thus has no overhang. The cartridge is inline with the deliberately-short tonearm, but several issues stem from this.... This design totally reduces the lateral forces that need to be corrected via anti-skating on normal turntables. I don't even think the Vestax tables include an anti-skating dial. By shortening the tonearm, they eliminate the need. This helps the needle track wonderfully in scratching and back-cueing situations. However, for playing records (yes, your precious records), the Vestax system is no good. Having no overhang on that type of arm produces azimuth and phase errors between the left and right channels. This distortion is a result of the needle NOT being tangent to the record groove during play (meaning that it points in a different direction depending on it's position on the record). In fact, it changes depending on where you are on the record. At the beginning of the record, there will be increased wear on the inner groove of the vinyl. The needle will track perfectly halfway through the record, then the increased wear will shift to the outer groove during the latter half of the record. So, the distortion will shift from left to right during play. Yes, this fscks-up your records.
So, there's a huge tradeoff. You trade sound quality and record wear for better tracking with those straight-arm Vestax tables. This is of no concern for a scratch DJ, but is an issue if you value your vinyl. I hope this helps.
