Thanks for all that.
I’ll try my existing cartridges in a comparison and report back ...
I’ll try my existing cartridges in a comparison and report back ...
Best cartridge for very old worn vinyl
Fellow vinyl junkies,
I have a weakness for old vinyl (particularly early oval Argo choral recordings circa 1958-1969).
Almost invariably these suffer from worn grooves, the effects of god knows what misaligned agricultural arms/cartridges over several decades, even the ones marked “near mint” by professional sellers.
I have a range of cartridges, including Decca London Reference, Koetsus, SPUs and Shure V15 111.
These go in an FR66 arm. Not all of these are necessarily ideal for this job...:)
What do you guys reckon is the best cartridge for these types of records?
Key requirements are not to be flustered by the challenges these ancient slabs of vinyl hold while doing the best job of producing something resembling music ?
Cheers !
I have a weakness for old vinyl (particularly early oval Argo choral recordings circa 1958-1969).
Almost invariably these suffer from worn grooves, the effects of god knows what misaligned agricultural arms/cartridges over several decades, even the ones marked “near mint” by professional sellers.
I have a range of cartridges, including Decca London Reference, Koetsus, SPUs and Shure V15 111.
These go in an FR66 arm. Not all of these are necessarily ideal for this job...:)
What do you guys reckon is the best cartridge for these types of records?
Key requirements are not to be flustered by the challenges these ancient slabs of vinyl hold while doing the best job of producing something resembling music ?
Cheers !
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What they said covers the standard stylus/groove aspect. There’s also the moving mass part, which is why the better high end carts tend to outperform in terms of surface noise. With that in mind I would be giving Peter Ledermann a call at Soundsmith. You can’t be the only one with this problem and he would be the man to make one for you, if he doesn’t already have something perfect just sitting there ready to go. |
Jperry and Chakster have offered diametrically opposing opinions. From what I have read over years, I think Chakster is more likely to be on the right track. Those old LPs are most likely to have been worn out with spherical and/or early classic elliptical styli. So statistically your best bet for getting more music out would be to use a stylus with a different shape that contacts the groove walls differently from a spherical or elliptical. Most modern styli fall into the categories of line contact or microridge, although there are a bewildering number of names for very slightly different shapes, like Shibata. There may be reasons to hunt specifically for one particular shape that would be particularly good at contacting unworn regions of the groove, and perhaps someone else knows. |
I think you should look at some of the EMT cartridges with spherical styli. They have both stereo and mono models https://www.emt-tontechnik.ch/cartridges |
In my opinion, and this is what i heard from others, an old record are worn by very simple styli (conical/spherical) with high tracking force up to 4g. Now these records can be played with Shibata or MicroRidge profile and since groove contact area is wider for such profiles the stylus pick up information from previously untouched part of the groove walls. Simple stylus profiles missing a lot of information because of the conical/spherical contact area (very thin compared to MicroRidge, LineContact etc). When you play it again with Conical/Spherical you can only do harm to the exact same part of groove walls. But when you;re using LineContact type (or Ridge) you're using untouched part of the grooves. If the records are cleaned then you can improve playback with advanced profile, seems like you already have it. What you think ? |