HELIUS DESIGNS: Their tone arm upgrade policy defined

They say:

Upgrades can be divided into two arenas, electrical and mechanical.  The most popular upgrade is to the wiring and cables.

The standard internal wire is copper, so the first upgrade we offer is to change this to single strand silver. The wire is 0.25mm in diameter with both channels being twisted into pairs.

The better wire is the 0.15mm diameter cryogenically treated silver, with each channel forming a Litz construction. Positive and negative

Channels are paired in counter-rotating helixes, and then reversed for the second pair. This way, full advantage is taken of the twisted Litz format. In all, nearly 8 metres of wire is used per arm.

The second upgrade recommended is to change the external cables to the new format developed for the Omega arm. Here, we extend the internal wires out through the underside of the arm ( usually by about 200 mm ) and terminate them into a small plastic box fitted with two female phono connectors.

There are several advantages for doing this. The first one is that the fine internal wires do not adversely affect the turntable suspension in the same way that the solid cables do. They remain equally flexible in all directions.

The second significant advantage  is that you can then use whatever cables you want from the tonearm to the phono stage. Is is not uncommon these days for people to have a specific preference of cable types to suit the rest of the system

The mechanical upgrades fall into two categories, one is the change the specification of any given arm to a higher grade, and secondly to upgrade specific components within a product.

For example  an early Cyalene can be upgraded to the MKII super-Cyalene by changing counterweights, arm tubes and downforce adjustments.

It is also might be possible to change the bearings for rubies or ceramic balls.

It must be pointed out that a Scorpio 1 cannot be upgraded to a Scorpio 3, they are two fundamentally different designs, in the same way that an Orion cannot be upgraded to a Cyalene.

http://www.heliusdesigns.co.uk/