When I first saw the Vestigal tonearm in 1975 I was impressed by the opportunity of the design. I had an initial concern that the vertical undulation of the front part of the tonearm would cause enough forward-backward displacement as to create pitch changes which somebody had called "warp wow." My own LOCI was designed to counter that by making the same undulation over record warps in a more-vertical direction. (I'll say "more-vertical" because the motion is still an arc of a circle, but the center of that circle in the LOCI tonearm is right at the record surface due to its articulated parallelogram design.)

     Like many audio weenies, I had only speculated on the effect. Since audio degredation often is damaging to overall sound before being specifically observable, and because it's easier to speculate about something like this than it is actually to demonstrate it, I claimed advantage in the LOCI design.

     It turns out there is another design advantage, the consistency of the vertical tracking angle (VTA) of the stylus in the record groove and, furthermore, its easy adjustment, but that was not claimed in the LOCI patent.

     Well, here is a seriously warped record and here are four examples, Vestigal and LOCI, outer and inner grooves, where the warp-wow effect is clearly, audibly worse on the Vestigal tonearm than on the LOCI tonearm. While that doesn't suggest every Vestigal-tonearm owner should find a LOCI tonearm on eBay, it does vindicate my original supposition, at least under some more-extreme circumstances.