Straight up and down. I guess I am really referring to the angle of the stylus as being at 90 degrees from the record surface. The posts I've read seem to mention a 1-2 angle forward tilt to the stylus from true vertical. That's where I came up with the zero degrees. It appears that my stylus is pretty close to that (as a baseline).
OK, that is what I thought you were getting at. I read the article Scott posted and according to the author, it didn't make jack squat difference. For the most part, I agree, but I do have a habit of locating the arm horizontal to the record surface, (with stylus in the groove) and leaving it at that. I know that different weight records will change that (ever so small), but I don't really care. I'm not going to spend my life change SRA all the time.
Considering the journey the stylus makes thru the side of the record, with only two "happy spots" (null point locations), the rest being filled with ever change tracking angle distortions, I think this really, truly makes the SRA kind of not a factor, or at best just another vector in the ever changing journey.
Warped records discussed in the article did make me start to think, and one thing I thought of that the author did not (or at least mention) is inertia. I suppose this depends on how drastic the warp is, but I have had some records that were so bad, that the stylus actually left the groove. Would changing (or adding) a degree (putting the tale up) on the tonearm help this? Maybe, maybe not.
I do wonder about tonearms that have viscous damping. Since this retards the arms movement to change, I suspect a problem if the damping is too much, causing the stylus to become airborn to the positive side of the warp and crash into the groove on the downward movement, because it was too slow to react. After all, the damping will affect horizontal and vertical movement.
A very interesting topic.
Wayner
