The KOSMIC arm has been created in collabaration with KOSMIC LLC to produce a tonearm that will compete with the best available whilst still offering exceptional value for money.

The development brief was to match the arm closely to a small selection of turntables – primarily the Hanss range – and an equally tight selection of cartridges, the first being ZYX, whilst looking at every component and optimising its performance.

The new Hanss turntables are particularly exciting with a range from the (almost) affordable to seriously high end. All are beautifully thought out and made and incorporate some of the latest thinking. Likewise the ZYX cartridges have brought some fresh ideas to moving coil design and have pushed the boundaries ever further.

 Creating a product of sufficient quality to join those two components together to create a top class analogue system is a challenge. They deserve the very best.

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We started with the existing Audiomods arm design. It needed no fundamental rethink because the underlying concept is simple and sound: base the design on research by industry experts over the last 50 years and then just use best engineering practice in the construction and execution. Because the arm is designed to be hand made in tiny quantities, experiments and changes can be made easily – there’s no production line to stop.

The first prototype – running on the Hanss T60 with a zyx (??)into the exceptionally revealing ASR Basis Exclusive  phono stage was promising. This is serious high-end stuff and any weak link is going be obvious. This test arm is mostly a standard Audiomods but Joe pronounced it “exceptional’ and his standards are high. Very high.  If you hear that arm and like it, what you would buy will be significantly better.

The second KOSMIC prototype arm incorporated many lessons and modifications:

Arm tube
All Rega arm tubes are not the same, even from the same batch, so we are selecting the thickest tubes and the most even castings. It does make a difference. Some extra internal bracing has also been added inside.

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The arm lift stays on. Removing this was originally part of making the arm work with very high compliance cartridges. For the MCs it really doesn’t apply. Retaining it was harder than it sounds because the headshell then didn’t fit the setup jig used to machine the headshell face.

A precision alignment point is added to the arm tube at the pivot point to aid setup. Again, this was not straightforward because we can’t rely on the casting itself for reference. The final answer has been to put the armtube assembly, complete with bearings, in a jig and use a precision laser to map the centre point. Whilst the arm tube is set up in the centering jig, a reference flat is machined onto the bearing journal to accept a spirit level for vta alignment.

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Bearings
Joe wanted the arm to be of the highest quality possible, so he specified ABEC9 bearings. This is a dimensional standard to the very tightest limits and it’s reached by the manufacturer individually measuring and selecting the bearings for us. Very few bearing manufacturers are willing to do this kind of service in the small quantities we need. Luckily, I’ve found one. I’m not sharing them!

The Audiomods ceramic bearings are to ABEC7 standard - the highest used in tonearm manufacture - so perhaps 10-20% of each batch achieved the ABEC9 grade inspection. Using them wasn’t simply a case of swapping out bearings as you can only use high-precision bearings in high-precision mountings, so each bearing carrier is test-fitted and hand adjusted to match. It’s a time-consuming process but essential to get the best from the bearings.

After some experiments I've added sprung washers under the bearing carrier screws to ensure constant loading with temperature changes.

Base and body
Here we have refined the look to suit the new turntable. The existing micrometer base has been reshaped to sit more naturally on the Hanss mounting and the plastic arm rest has gone. It works perfectly well, but its replacement, a hand made, leather-lined aluminium one, just looks more at home on a high-end deck. To get the new, tapered shape the base plate blanks are now machined using a high-tech water jet CNC profiler and then individually hand finished.

Antiskate
Joe realised the importance of accurate bias control and wanted to be able to set up antiskate to very fine limits, so the mechanism has been redesigned to provide a sliding adjustment for the standard quadrant to allow closer matching to the chosen cartridge.

Wiring
The internal wire is a pure (99.999%) silver 7-strand litz configuration in a continuous run from cartridge to plugs. Outside the arm, it’s run inside a plated copper screen. This means that the wiring is, in effect, in a balanced configuration. After a lot of research into the cartridge tags, including some very expensive “boutique” products, we’ve returned to the Michell tags as simply the best design around and the easiest for an owner to use. The standard Nakamichi phono plugs, already very good quality, have been replaced by the far more expensive Oyaide ones to give a continuous run of silver for the signal path. 

Build
The latest version of the arm has pushed the build quality even further than the original. For consistency, some of the basic machining is now given over to CNC production lines and the arm lift support plates are Laser cut. For the KOSMIC arms, parts are individually selected and matched and each bearing surface is hand machined to final limits beyond the CNC processes. Finally, all the exterior surfaces are hand polished.

Next
The final customer arms will feature deep cryogenic treatment for the arm tube, arm yoke, cartridge tags, phono plugs and signal wires. After all of the machining operations on the arm, the die-cast arm tube will benefit from the stress relief the treatment gives and the improvements to the wiring are well known. We've been careful to select only those parts that will actually benefit from the treatment. It’s an expensive and lengthy process but a detail that is worth doing when we are looking for the ultimate performance.

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6 Nutfield Road, Redhill, Surrey, RH1 4AU United Kingdom
Tel: +44(0)1737 769040
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