Technics anti skate and tonearm

[cytek]

i have 2 sl 1200mk5s about 7 months old. recently i started to notice one of my tone arms pulling towards the center of the platter more than it should. i tried adjusting the anti skate and it did not help. After playing around with it i slightly, and i mean SLIGHTLY, adjusted the top screw on the tone arm to where it keeps its place and does not pull as hard towards the center. My question is, the tone arm test with the anti skate does not pull it to the center of the platter and back to resting place, do i need to replace or is there something i am missing. My other table the tests works but when i turn the anti skate back to zero it moves back and forth moving away from the platter. Like i said these are less than a year old.

i have not had had any trouble while playing on them, just wondering if anyone has heard of this problem. I use serato more so than vinyl. Thanks

[optic]

If you have brand new turntables, the anti-skate should work, unless you had some work done, like replacing the tonearm, and the tech didn't put it back correctly.

However, we have also seen some instances where the anti-skate mechanism was set differently on turntables, and sometimes didn't work, or did not work as well as in the videos. The videos represent a perfectly set Anti-Skate on a perfectly leveled turntable. It's a service shop, so our environment is set up that way. We did not take into consideration that our viewers would not have such optimal environments, so we are in the process of re-creating the videos to match real-world settings.

The anti-skate is shown here (no need to disassemble your turntable - just showing you what it looks like):


Notice that spring that is circled in the green... This is the actual spring which controls the anti-skate on the tonearm. There is a small shaft on the bottom of the tonearm, and this shaft connects to this spring. If it's off or not set correctly, it will cause some issues with the anti-skate.

This is just a different angle of the tonearm fixing plate

If you do have an anti-skate that doesn't work properly, chances are it was not installed correctly, or it's damaged. If it's damaged, you can see it's all part of this assembly - known as the TONEARM FIXING PLATE. You can buy it here.

NOTE:
However, just because your anti-skate does not work like it does in the video, it DOES NOT MEAN that your tonearm is damaged. The main thing is to just play a record from beginning to end, back cue/scratch a little in between, and if you find that it skips in some areas more so than others, then you MIGHT have a misaligned tonearm. The next step would be to test the tonearm using the steps in the video. The main thing is that the tonearm does not skip very easily. If it does, then you might have an issue. Again, I apologize for not clearly defining this in the video. I did not take into consideration that people watching weren't technicians, so I assumed everyone knew the steps to follow.

We are working on the new video and it will be up shortly.

In the meantime, feel free to post any questions here.

Sorry for any confusion this caused.

[DjTrixxx]

I am experiencing a similar issue with my MK2 turntable. It was working fine and all of a sudden I noticed that records were skipping at different spots throughout the vinyl. I tried different vinyl records and different carts and same result. I did the test with the anti skate and noticed that when I turn the dial of the anti skate the tone arm does not move from where I placed it. It doesn't move to the center nor does it attempt to move back towards the arm rest.