Produced through a precise laser cutting process on solid aluminum, ensuring the highest degree of accuracy in terms of tolerances and providing a steadfast base for the cartridge, but without the presence of weight reducing holes frequently found in other headshells, which can negatively impact the transmission of vibrations and lead to a distorted sound, especially hindering image focus and sound solidity. The headshell is then fitted to a solid aluminum collar, ensuring a seamless integration with the arm tube, resulting in a heightened sense of dimensionality in the representation of vocals and instruments, offering a more realistic sound experience.

Ensuring the secure placement of the cartridge above the record is vital to preventing distortions or loss of information in the music. Poor rigidity of the arm tube can result in loss of detail, especially for backing vocals, and to mitigate this, the Altus uses an arm tube with a 2mm thick wall. A rigid arm tube enhances vibration transmission away from the cartridge, reducing the impact of higher frequency vibrations on sound quality.

The overall rigidity of the tonearm structure is critical to ensuring faithful reproduction of everything that is captured within your records. In the same way the bearing of the turntable is critical to performance, tonearm bearings are no less vital and directly affect the quality of the sound you ultimately hear.

For this reason, all AVID tonearms are meticulously hand-built and individually tested to extreme limits. High specification ball race bearings are painstakingly fitted and both horizontal and vertical bearing shafts are machined and ground to micron limits to ensure the only movement possible is in the desired directions with almost zero friction and zero loss of sound quality.

Progressive inner groove distortion is something that occurs as the platter rotates and centripetal forces pull the tonearm towards the centre of the record. This causes the stylus to have an imbalanced pressure on the groove wall and can result in a distorted sound.

Bias adjustment is a mechanism that counteracts this, however as the centripetal force is not the same across the record the amount of force required will be different, with more force required towards the centre.

Our tonearms designs have a mechanism which will increase force gradually to counteract the centripetal affect as it gets closer to the centre, so your musical enjoyment remains constant from start to finish.