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!

[cliveb]

In our last conversation, we came up with three increasingly strignent criterium for selecting a decent USB turntable:
[*]Ceramic cartridge never!
[*]Anti-skate

Agreed.

[*]Direct drive (remember, these are sub-$1,000 turntables)

Where does that requirement come from? There are plenty of decent belt drive turntables below $1000. There is no reason to believe that belt drive is inferior to direct drive at any particular price point.

Indeed, IMHO a cheap direct drive it likely to be worse than a similarly priced belt drive. Direct drive turntables require high torque motors with excellent speed stability. Such motors are not cheap. Belt drive can get away with fairly inexpensive low torque motors, because the belt/platter provides a mechanical smoothing buffer against speed instability.

[*]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?

Just because a turntable like this has no user adjustable anti-skating doesn't necessarily mean it has none. Given that this is an "all-in-one" package, the tracking weight and antiskating could well be factory-preset.

That said, the device looks cheap and plasticy to me. Audio Technica have a solid reputation for pickup cartridges, but they do not have a history of good turntable production. This product looks to me like they decided there was a bandwagon (cheap USB turntables) they needed to jump on.