Inside the TH1: Tuneable Tonearm Tension

The Uncertainty of Cartridge Matching

Analog lovers face a frustrating reality: there’s no guaranteed way to know if a component will sound good in their system. You can watch reviews, read forum posts, attend shows — and still wind up guessing. You might get close to the result you’re hoping for, but most of the time, it’s just an educated guess.

This uncertainty is especially prevalent when pairing cartridges and tonearms. Audiophiles often refer to figures like effective mass and compliance to predict compatibility, but the truth is, those numbers only scratch the surface. Most experienced audiophiles will agree: every pairing sounds different.

Sometimes the differences are subtle. Other times they’re drastic. And when you’re thinking about buying a tonearm or cartridge that costs as much as a used car, that’s not a great feeling.

Understanding Cartridge - Tonearm Interaction

To understand why, you have to think about what the tonearm is actually doing. The stylus traces a groove by vibrating side to side — often at very high frequencies, and with incredibly small movements. The cartridge is trying to hold onto this moving stick (the cantilever) and convert that motion into a signal.

The tonearm’s job is to allow that movement in the right directions while resisting everything else. It has to stay mechanically quiet — not add its own motion, noise, or resonance — and still let the cartridge follow the spiral of the record.

The challenge is that every cartridge behaves differently. The way vibrations move into the arm varies depending on mass, suspension, stylus shape, and even what kind of music you’re playing. Some tonearms handle this well with one cartridge and fall apart with another. A “good match” is just a case where the interaction between arm and cartridge ends up sounding controlled and musical.

Even if you can measure the resonant frequency of the combo, you still don’t know if you’ve hit the ideal spot — or just a usable one.

The Airon Solution - Adjustable Tonearm Tension

With the TH1, we decided to do something about it.

During prototyping, we tested dozens of armtube shapes and materials. Each had its own resonant behavior and tonal fingerprint — and whether that helped or hurt depended on the system it landed in.

At some point, we stopped trying to find the “best” one and started asking a different question:What if the arm didn’t have to be one thing?

We kept our best-performing shape — a D-shaped, ultra-high modulus carbon fiber tube — and began experimenting with how to tune its properties. What we discovered was that by compressing the armtube — literally adding internal tension — we could shift the sound. Higher tension gave more detail and bite. Lower tension felt smoother and more liquid.

The hard part wasn’t the concept — it was building it into the arm without hurting anything else.

The Mechanics Behind the TH1's Tuneable Tension

Running inside the arm from the headshell to the rear is a rigid internal rod. At the back of the tonearm, there’s a small, knurled adjustment knob. Turn it, and you apply axial load through the rod — which preloads the entire upper structure of the arm.

This changes the stiffness of the armtube — not in a way that makes it flexible or unstable, but just enough to shift how it interacts with cartridge energy. It’s like voicing an instrument. You’re not changing what it is — just how it handles energy and responds to vibration.

After multiple design revisions, we landed on a system that’s reliable, adjustable, and sonically useful. It doesn’t make the TH1 a different arm — it just lets it adapt more intelligently to the cartridge you choose.

With the TH1 tuneable tonearm, you’re no longer locked into one sound. Adjust the internal tension to optimize your cartridge-tonearm pairing and reveal what your system is truly capable of.