The Importance of Anti-skate, Do decks without it skew left? Options

[Knowzy]

In our last conversation, we came up with three increasingly strignent criterium for selecting a decent USB turntable:

1. Ceramic cartridge never!
2. Anti-skate
3. Direct drive (remember, these are sub-$1,000 turntables)

I'm having particular trouble explaining the anti-skate requirement.

Here's what I'm hoping HA can answer:

• Do turntables without anti-skate, such as the Audio-Technica LP2D-USB, truly have no compensation and ride the inner groove like a surfer catching a wave?
• Someone at the Vinyl Engine suggested that the weight of the "high mass" tonearms found on such TT's essentially force the stylus into the middle of the groove. Thoughts on this?

I need some compelling reasons to choose a deck with anti-skate, especially for people who don't plan on replacing the cart.

There's already a good reason to choose a TT without anti-skate: Newbies don't need to learn how to balance their tonearm.

Thanks!

[Axon]

Here's what I'm hoping HA can answer:

• Do turntables without anti-skate, such as the Audio-Technica LP2D-USB, truly have no compensation and ride the inner groove like a surfer catching a wave?

You might want to clarify that some?

• Someone at the Vinyl Engine suggested that the weight of the "high mass" tonearms found on such TT's essentially force the stylus into the middle of the groove. Thoughts on this?

Not true, I believe. Certainly, the skating force is a force, so that the force acting upon a heavier object will cause less motion as the object becomes heavier. But given that the motion of the tonearm is already constrained by the groove, I don't see how that really affects anything.

Moreover, the skating force is proportional to the frictional force between the stylus and groove - which is proportional to the tracking force. And cheaper tonearms tend to have heavier-tracking cartridges. One could, in fact, make the statement that cheaper cartridges are often in greater need of antiskate than more expensive cartridges for that reason.

I need some compelling reasons to choose a deck with anti-skate, especially for people who don't plan on replacing the cart.

The most compelling reason I can offer is that it improves tracking ability by a substantial amount. Not getting antiskate right = much greater risk of skipped grooves.

Moreover, when recording to the computer, having an antiskate that's adjustable on the fly (like the knobs on the PL120 and SL1200) means that if you do encounter groove skipping, you can slowly lower the antiskate until the skipping stops, then quickly raise it back up again to reduce the risk of skipping forward. I've had to do that several times with particularly irascible records. Once it's all recorded, you can patch up the skips quite cleanly, to the point where the digitized record tracks better than the real one ever did!

The traditional compelling reason for antiskate is that it improves cartridge lifetimes significantly. I guess this isn't as much of a concern when the stylus costs $30 to begin with (if that), but it's a big concern for more expensive stylii. Also, record wear obviously goes down, but if the record will only be played once, it's not clear how big of a deal it is.

There's already a good reason to choose a TT without anti-skate: Newbies don't need to learn how to balance their tonearm.

I'd say that unless the cartridge is a P-Mount to begin with, one should always, without exception, balance/align their tonearm. Too many of them are not well balanced coming out of the factory. There'