looking for a DIY end of record lift for a manual tt

[Badge]

I love my Linn but somethings wonder around while it plays and forget to cue it at the end of the record. There were a couple of commercial offerings, but they seem to have gone away. Has anyone built a device to lift the arm at the end of play?

[arnoldc]

Our local guy, Mandy Marino made Tonal - a tone arm lifter with auto-reset.

See pictures

[Badge]

It looks like when the arm reaches the lift it trips and rotates to lift. Is that correct? Are they available to purchase? Thanks

[arnoldc]

I sent you his email address.

[EC8010]

About thirty years ago, Monitor Audio made a rather natty little device called "Stylift". It was essentially a vertical post with a pivot sticking out horizontally about halfway up. On the pivot rotated a cylindrical vertical weight with a thin bar sticking past the pivot. The weight was rotated to be at the top (where it was unstable) and the bar rested against a stop. The idea was that the arm would gently knock the cylindrical weight and it would overbalance, the thinner bar would then swing up and collect the arm. Although it sounds bizarre, it worked very well and I successfully made a couple for higher mass arms.

[SY]

Empire made something like that, too, for their turntables. I used one- once; when the arm hit the trigger, the weight swung around the pivot, lifted the arm, and it kept going. Bounced the stylus off the label, onto the spindle, and sheared the cantilever off neat as you please.

I suspect that a silicone damped arm would be a better candidate for a device like this.

[arnoldc]

EC8010, what you described seems a lot of work and freightening for the arm

SY, the lifting device I posted I so simple and effective, you should see it in action. No possibility for what you described. It's very popular here, and almost all friends I know with pivoted arms use it.

[Aengus]

I've used the Stylift without the disaster that Sy describes, but it never worked very well, possibly owing to my own ham-handedness. Positioning is very critical, at least on a Sondek, and it was either have it too close to the record's perimeter and lose the last few bars, or have it too close to the centre and have it not lift the arm. It turns out that there are enough out-of-spec records that both of these events happened too often for my liking even when the device was in the exact right spot. So I gave up on it.

I have fantasized about, but never built nor even properly designed, a lift which would use an optical sensor to trigger a (hydraulic? magnetic?) lift arm - see the drawing, which shows a plan view. Ideally, I suppose, a second optical sensor mounted towards the outside would reset the lift to its lowest point when you moved the arm back out.

Regards.

Aengus

[edit: grammar fix ...and typos ]

[EC8010]

Yes, I was aware that a lot of people didn't like the Stylift. I think it's great and I have one on my SME3009S2 and would have one on my homebrew arm except that I failed to leave room for it. It's true that ou-of-spec. records cause problems, but you can't blame that on the mechanism, more the record. John Martyn's "One World" is a case in point, with a ridiculously small recorded diameter.

[Aengus]

Agreed, not the fault of the mechanism, but frustrating nonetheless. The real issue, I suppose, is whether the geometry of one's particular table and arm allow positioning the Stylift far enough away from the arm pivot that the arm has significant lateral motion at the Stylift. Ideally suited to 12" arms, perhaps?

On looking at my previous post, even two edits were apparently insufficient. I meant to say that the drawing showed an elevation, not a plan view.

Regards.

Aengus