Brand New Vinyl Static and Pops

A Kilavolt No. 103 from Nagaoka.....

...good luck finding one....

Mine still works.....carbon brush may need replacing.....only...*eh* 40ish yrs. old....

Zerostat is not a record cleaner. The trick is to clean an LP before play without charging it up or to disperse the charge after cleaning.Zerostat helps in the latter case.

I would double-check that the stylus connection wires are properly seated and the stylus alignment is correct. The cartridge should have specs indicating what to set the anti-skate to. The blue might require a higher anti-skate setting. If everything checks out correctly and you’re discharging any static electric buildup before playback, I suggest swapping the cartridges to see if the problem goes away. If so, then the cartridge itself could be a bad cartridge.

If your brother just swapped out the cartridges, then I would double check what your turntable's settings are against the specs for the Blue.

Try a cartridge with a microline or Shibata stylus. Superior tracking IMHO.

I have never seen a cartridge that came with a written spec for anti-skate. And I doubt AS has anything to do with the JJ problem of ticks and pops. Of course if he’s applying way too much AS, that’s a problem per se.