Are wood cartridge bodies “ gimmicky”?

No, you really did nail it, even the most dense, stable woods still expand / contract with change of seasons, humidity, temperature. Nature of the beast. Some less than others, and pieces as small as a headshell or moreso a cartridge body the wood movement can be very, very small. But it still moves. Not a desirable feature on something like a headshell where some pull their hair out getting things like azimuth / VTA to accuracies smaller than the width of a hair... But for most people though this would not be a big issue...

The real question *is*, as you asked, what does wood do that other materials don't.... better yet, does it do them at least as well as other materials commonly used used to date? Does wood have better resonance / dampening properties than some of the materials used on many popular headshells for instance?

If not, then I can't see any benefit other than aesthetics as stated. But aesthetics is important too, right?

 

See the Naim Solstice. It’s not a cartridge body in question there, but if it has no benefit to that piece of equipment then why do Naim hide the aesthetics of the wood under an outer casing.

 

don't the Ortofon SPU's do the same? Wood "innards" with plastic cover

 

i just had to look it up. the worst case thermal expansion for wood happens accross the grain, coefficient 30 x 10 minus 6 in per in per deg F.
bottom line a wood cartridge will expand .0045 in. accross the grain if the temperature rises 30 degrees, e.g. 68 room temp to 98 F. this is slightly less than the width of a human hair. good to know!

 

The problem comes if any of that movement is non-linear and results in twisting and warping too. Not all wood expands and contracts and remains true. Again, as I stated though, the movement is small, but if you had warping to boot you could knock off the azimuth by a mm I bet on a headshell where the wood chosen was reactionary and not as stable as another piece with straight grain.

But yes, we're splitting hairs! (pun intended). But it does happen.

EDIT: note I didn't fact check you're math --- I could pull a couple of books off the shelf LOL

 

Avanti - I haven't counted, but I bet my headshell collection is over 30, maybe 40. (yeah, I know...)

Interesting I still don't own a wood headshell. They've ended up in my cart a few times, but never pulled the trigger. Being a woodworker, and loving nice wood, I love the idea but just never pulled the trigger. I will probably own one at some point just for the cool factor, I bet with a nice one out of dense wood I don't notice any difference really....

Do you own any?

 

Hey @avanti1960 Speaking of wood stuff for audio gear , look what's brewing in the woodshop in the last week (TT bases):

Wood type: Padauk (targeted for the GT-2000L, but playing with shellac on it right now for fun. 2" thick, 24" x 18")

Pic one, after some initial glue up


Next, rough slab glued up, photo of cut edge: (note the top is 5 pieces glued together at 3.75" a piece - all chosen from one 8ft x 8 inch Padauk 8/4 rough sawn slab, which I cut down, milled and glued up by hand. The pic below with no visible glue up lines, sharp edges is supposed to show a teeny bit of skill



Next base --- Wood Type: Cherry (under the Yamaha Gt-2000L right now, later will be under PL-70Lii. 2" thick, 23" x 17" Didn't take many pics during construction, but included one installed! I plan on additional finishing later.) There is a pic of it under construction below.

Note that that piece on the sled shown below is rough glue up, before finish planing and sanding. If you look closely, you'll see "alpha" shaped pencil marks on the piece, denoting certain things to glue up orientation for me when building. Also, that 1/16th in cutoff piece again is supposed to show care taken during glue up - note how the tiny cutoff is still glued together 100%. You can see the glue squeeze out from when I assembled.

 

Six coats of shellac later.... (the padauk one pic'd above - this was taken a few min ago). Note padauk is very pourous (think red oak, a little less than that), so it would take six more shellac coats to fill those grain voids and get a glass smooth top. BUT - if I used this one on my Yamaha GT-2000L, where I clean LPs with alcohol in the mix, it would damage a pure shellac finish.

Also note - shellac comes in one sheen - high gloss! It's up to the user to buff to desired finish, I plan on going for a satin finish on this one.... but what you see is how shellac starts out before buffing. This coat below was applied just a couple of hours ago.

I may either relocate it longer term to somewhere where I don't clean LPs (I have a few TT's to choose from ) and just be careful not to set any drinks on it. Best for most to put a coat of polyurethane over the buffed down shellac for protection - and you can pick your gloss. You get both the beauty of a shellac finish underneath a hard shell like poly.


Another angle, you can see the voids still in the finish where the shellac is still soaking into the grain after six coats! And that's with the last two coats being a 2.5 llb cut. Nature of the best, expected. If it were hard maple, three or four coats and 100 sealed!

This was taken in the shop before carrying it out for photos above - lights shown for effect.

Oh, here's the cherry one alluded to in the last post currently employed under the Yamaha. It's a simple / basic hand rub oil finish (100% tung / poly mix) - note cherry darkens over time to a deep beautiful red that no stain or finish can match. The pice show has carefully choen pieces with all the sapwood cut out.

Please disregard what appears to be somthing stuck to the front of my TT plinth, I'll have to investigate what that is!

 

Oh, and here's the white oak one I installed under my SL-1200G a couple weeks back (need to get a pic installed) while it was under construction. Here it's at the smoothing phase. Note that looks like a lot of wood taken off, but it's not. That Lie Nielsen plane (the smaller smoother) can shave ribbon thin shavings a create a pile when you've barely taken 1/64th off the piece.

This one is not as wide or long as the other two above as the Technics is smaller than the GT-2000L and PL-70Lii, but this one is 2 1/2 inches thick (the others are 2") and weighs in near 20lbs!! Dimensions are 20.5" x 15/5" in x 2 1/2" thick

 

WOW! awesome job!

 

correct, wood expands 10 x more accross the grain as with it, so twist will happen.
hopefully wood bodied cartridge makers will take note and position the grain at right angles.
maybe they should use MDF? nah, doesn't have that "ring" to it.

 

Thanks.

Actually just tinkering - it's been a while, so using these to get the tools tuned up, play with my new shellac brushes, etc.

I have other plans for TT bases including true butcher block, etc. These were just for fun.

 

Sure, stable, but there go the aesthetics!!

 

Most wood bodies have the grain along the major axis....front to back. This means any expansion will be on either side of the centerline of the cartridge body, meaning virtually no lateral drift in the stylus alignment. Also, since the wood is thinnest along the top of the generator there will be very little variation in height. So in the case of cartridge bodies, shifts due to temp and humidity will be virtually nil. Headshells are a different matter.

 

Which raises the question, why do they bother making all of those instruments out of wood when metal or plastic are much more stable? Just asking for a friend who’s not a musician and who’s never heard a wood-bodied instrument.

JohnK

 

You are a true craftsman Mr TheVinylAddict. I hope that my Lenco plinth looks half as good when it’s finished.


In the 40 odd years I have been reading about hifi, I have never heard of any of the aforementioned problems with stability or alignment of wooden cartridge bodies. Lucky I guess not to have my illusions of a Urushi cartridge in my system one day shattered, but let me indulge in a little humour.

The makers of some wooden bodied cartridges some on here are discussing must be those who avoid very dense hard woods which others might carefully select, dry and season over years, preferring the well weathered soft wood baton off cuts that fall from builders lorries. ‘Road fall’ they call it, the soggier the better. Selection of the best is an almost forgotten dark art. After a quick dry for a few days on the radiator this roughshod pine reject is chopped into small blocks then sanded into approximately audio pick up cartridge size. Why machine to exact size then carefully measure for tolerance to allow for comparative expansion of both wood and generator in a domestic environment when the wide grained body will warp and expand way beyond measured factory limits in short order? Why treat the wood, seal it or oil it with specially formulated waxes and preservatives to stabilise a tendency of wood however dense to distort when the buyer will never see or appreciate such attention to detail? Just get a can of jazzy paint and put down over some sprinkles of oil to mimick an exotic lacquer effect.
And to ensure optimum performance the makers recommend playing their cartridges in the steamiest basement kitchen where the chefs do stir fried vegetables for 18 hour a day!
But a few words of caution. Such woods and environments attract wood eating insects. Those clicks and pops you hear are not damage to the vinyl groove or ingrained dirt, but the chomping jaws of the Deathwatch beetle! In case wood boring insect holes do appear the makers have thoughtfully included a small tube of dark and dense wax to rub into unwanted holes or voids. After a few months of use owners are advised to regularly inspect their cartridges undercarriage in case some beetle larvae have erroneously crawled onto the stylus cantilever thus compromising sound quality! Best avoided unless you are a hard core tweaker!

 

May have to branch out and try one of these.

 

I see what you did there....

 

If you examine the Koetsu line of cartridges, there appear to be only a few basic designs/levels of refinement, but, a wide range of different body material. For example, the Rosewood Signature Platinum has the same specifications as the Onyx Platinum. I believe they are the same guts with different bodies--one made of Onyx the other Rosewood (guess which is which). I've heard a comparison of the Rosewood cartridge and its equivalent Jade model and they do sound different--the wood bodied cartridge is warmer sound and the stone bodied cartridge sounds leaner and more nimble. I would bet it has to do with how the body resonates. As to which is "better" taste and particular system matching comes into play.

 

At least he didn’t start to sing ‘The Lumberjack Song!’

 

Sometimes I wonder if that reference in 2021 starts to show our age , but I got it immediately. Then again, I saw a poll on the OT forum that says most of us here are old fogies anyway.... oh, and male.

 

Damn, VA, I bow in your general direction! All I ever made was a napkin holder and it was crooked... I truly admire the work of master craftsmen as I have neither the skill or patience.

 

Thanks CS, coming from you that means something....

 

BTW, stay tuned, as I've learned so much about gear hear on SHF and it helped me to get to my endgame, as the tools sat idle I thought of all sorts of things like "why is it so hard to find one stand that effectively harbors two TT's / phono pre?"

I'm going to build some cool things over the next couple of years, I'll try and share. And maybe build some extras to share with others on SHF?

 

Nope.