Very Interesting Analysis of Cartridge Wear, Stylus Shapes, Tracking Force, etc.

Henk's pretty careful to say in his write-up that his figures for cart life are 'up to' X-number of hours, not a firm set number that you always hit.

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I seriously doubt the actual value of that gold could be more than a few cents. Even allowing for the value-added of turning it into foil, the amount is miniscule. I think the real cost is for someone's time and expertise to assemble each one. The crazy expensive carts are luxury goods, pure and simple. Materials can't be worth that much more than for mass produced carts on a per-unit basis, but R & D and overhead needs to be amortized over a WAY smaller number of units. The strategy is to sell very few very expensive ones instead of tons of cheap ones. They are definitely higher quality, no argument, but by the time you are in Koetsu country, I'd be surprised if net profit was less than 90%. Nothing wrong with that, by the way.

 

It's like I have a twin! (cartridge-replacement procrastination-wise).



At least a dozen years later my Ortofon Kontrapunkt A MC cart still sounds great. I listen to vinyl (alongside various digital formats) all the time but haven't racked up a humongous number of hours, and continuously tell myself that professional calibration, playing only meticulously cleaned records, and cleaning the stylus religiously have extended the life of this beautiful-sounding cart...

Being an inveterate cheapskate and the music still playing awesomely, with no audible degradation, is a potent combo.

 

The stylus may last but the cantilever suspension will be long gone. I think the 2000 hours figure is pushing it.

 

Well we all know the audio industry cannot live on a markup of 10-15%, so I suspect if that $250 figure is accurate they are charging you $500-700 for it. The numbers just get bigger, $1000 will cost you about $2000 and so on, they almost need to dbl their numbers to make it work. We probably have all seen the video of AJ Van den Hul make a cartridge on YT as well as Rega videos.....Time is not very long, so by the hour its not a lot even if you are paying $80-100 per hour salary. Ending up with a margin of 25% after all costs are paid and employees taken care of is probably what the bank wants.....That $20K cartridge probably cost $5K to make, if you sell 20 of them means you need about $100K to fund the mfg of them, that's a lot of money.

I have no clue what the advantage of the gold foil is, but I'll pass......

 

Pretty much what Ive understood so far. They factors for good performance a gentle playback is High contact area, minimal mass and force enough to never leave the groove walls. Too many people I see try to go the absolute lowest on the tracking force recommendations or lower in some cases. They dont realize its actually more harmful than going above the recommended range, and its debatable who writes the ranges sometimes too, engineers or marketing teams.

Ive wanted to get a more exotic stylus shape for very long, because I care a lot about preservation of the vinyl. Its just damn expensive usually, and ideally I would want a good table to install it on, because complex shapes require complex installation, Azimuth and SRA become more relevant and not many cheap tables can adjust that.

 

And you're dragging that needle with nearly a whole gram more force than mine!

 

Thank you for this excellent write up. I use an Ortofon Cadenza Black MC phono cartridge mounted on Pete Riggle's The Woody unipivot tonearm, on a modified JA Michell GyroDec SE turntable. Over the last few months, I've been conducting an blind A/B evaluation of two company's RCA ICs, two sets as installed between my phono preamp – linestage – amplifier. Of the five reviewers, one is a musician and the only women. She noticed very slight distortion in the woman's voice on a folk record that was one of the four titles every reviewer listened to. I had noticed a very slight touch of sibilance also over the last few months of play. One other reviewer noted that too, very slight. Since I can vary the SRA, I fussed with it to no avail on limiting sibilance. So I suspected something was not perfect with the stylus.

Religiously, I use a counter to track every side of record play on this cartridge. So for example, 2,000 sides of play is ~667 hours of travel for the stylus. I was at 2,450± sides of play at that point, or ~815 hours of play. Another way to think about it, the diamond traveled likely over 600 miles in that many sides of record playing.

So I put this question to a well-known U.S. dealer of Ortofon cartridges and manufacturer of vinyl cleaning solutions. He told me that Ortofon advised that for a uni-pivot tonearm, 1,600 hours of play was tops, and for a gimballed arm, 2,000 hours was the point of no return. At the same time, I emailed James Henriot of Whest Audio in the UK this same question. I use a Whest phono preamp and acquired the cartridge through Mr. Henriot. He told me that somewhere between 400 to 500 hours, the stylus was worn sufficient to create inner groove distortion, and at 800 hours, the worn stylus was capable of damaging vinyl via the mechanism you noted above. He told me the telltale signs are sibilance and distortion on some higher register voices. Well guess what?

I had a hard time believing what Mr. Henriot was telling me, and pressed him on it. He told me that Jico has studied this in great detail. They looked at the wear on a diamond stylus at different hours and measured the sonic impacts to come up with ~400-500 hours. He added that it is a matter of physics of frictional wear on a cut natural diamond and vinyl based on tracking force employed, quality of the diamond and of the vinyl.

I was stunned. So I did a much wider internet search. The differences of opinion on this subject are shocking. For one in support of Jico's research see this SHF thread, Jico SAS Stylus, the post by 'rushed again' on 1o June 2011: Jico SAS Stylus . See this thread on the Vinyl Engine, Turntable Forum, that also quotes the link you show above: How Long Does A Stylus Last Before Replacement Is Needed?- Vinyl Engine. See this 2011 thread on the Vinyl Engine, Turntable Forum, Jico Rates Stylus Wear: https://www.vinylengine.com/turntable_forum/viewtopic.php?t=34521.

From that last link, I post this quote by desktop » 30 Jan 2011: "I can't tell you how gut-wrenching it is for someone with hundreds of phono cartridge styli to find out that there is significant distortion due to styus wear after 600 hours on ANYTHING JICO has tested. They are very up-front about this on their website. They say that their SAS stylus ONLY begins to have this distortion vs wear/time-usage period after 500 hours. It is also true that the extreme styus designs will wear "with-the-disc" for the first 600-800 hours, and then catastrophic vinyl damage begins to appear."

For another expert view see GC Audio's take here: HOW LONG WILL MY STYLUS LAST? | Galen Carol Audio | Galen Carol Audio. Record purveyor Vinyl Me Please has a take: When to Change the Stylus on Your Turntable — Vinyl Me, Please.

Also see this Youtube video, How to know when to replace your stylus, see the 0:50 point:

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I think this guy has it about right, 500 to 700 hours a diamond stylus needs to be retipped or replaced.

In no uncertain terms, Mr. Henriot recommended Expert Stylus & Cartridge Co. in UK to retip the Ortofon. The U.S. dealer said he would give me a 20% discount toward purchase of a new one, but retipping services were not available through Ortofon. I know about VAS and Soundsmith too. Based on Mr. Henriot's powerful recommendation, I sent Expert Stylus an email.

In response from Expert and a subsequent conversation with Wyndham Hodgson, owner of Expert, I learned a few things. Mr. Hodgson developed the very first natural diamond stylus for the Decca Company 54 years ago. Expert currently produces over 100 profiles of diamond and sapphire for the retrieval of all periods of recorded sound. At one point, and possibly still, he was the consultant to the major record companies on calibration of cutting heads to produce vinyl records. His laboratories are possibly the most advanced world wide with facilities to manufacture precision components necessary for the repair of most makes of magnetic and moving coil cartridges. This is not an advertisement for Expert but I want to establish that maybe this guy knows what he is talking about. He knows more than virtually anyone out there on this subject. He has been doing cartridge retipping for 25 years (I have seen a review that has not pleased with Expert, an exception).

Expert advised me that by 400 to 500 hours or 1,200 to 1,500 play sides a diamond stylus was worn, depending on tracking force, and the cartridge needed to be examined. Likely the stylus needed to be replaced. Diamond shape makes little difference in the number of hours prior to retipping except for one aspect. Diamonds are made of only carbon in a lattice crystal structure. Expert's Paratrace design uses only natural diamonds of the very highest quality, no inclusions. From their laboratories, they determine the alignment of atoms and cut the stylus along that face. In so doing, Expert is able to cut a stylus that will last about 100 to 150 hours longer than a typical natural diamond stylus will last. That is the most you can get from a diamond.

I learned that as a diamond wore on the sides of a vinyl groove, it faceted the diamond and that created an edge on the face of the stylus. At some point, typically around 650 hours that would begin to cut or wear at a greater rate the vinyl. For that reason, it was a good run of thumb to retip every 500 hours, perhaps or a bit longer on Expert's Paratrace shaped stylus.

So let's do some simple mathematics for vinyl play. For my Ortofon Cadenza Black, given current U.S. retail price, the cost for me to play one side of a vinyl record is ~$1.80. To put this into perspective, if I play a favorite album once a week for a full year, both sides, and the record cost me $25 to buy, at the end of year one, I will have $215 invested into that record.

From the website the Art of Sound, here is a list of retippers: Cartridge Repairs, Retipping and Replacement Styli Suppliers. A list! [Archive] - The Art of Sound Forum.

To minimize stylus and vinyl wear, I clean all records prior to play. My go-to record cleaner has been the VPI17 vacuum machine. But a year or so back, I became intrigued with ultrasonic cleaning of vinyl. I researched the heck out of doing that, primarily because I was concerned with damaging the vinyl. I buy a lot of used records, and I can attest that damage already exists in most of them since 95% of the playing public has been using the same stylus for thousands of hours. Yeah, I know, because I hear it on a good system as groove damage even when the visual inspection of the vinyl grades it at VG++. That journey had me tagging websites and threads, and taking a lot of notes. I ended up corresponding with a lot of folks who were involved in discovering ultrasonic cleaning of vinyl.

When I looked back on how anal I had been in research, I decided to pull my notes together as an article to share with just friends. One friend suggested I submit that article to Bill Hart, owner of The Vinyl Press. He loved the article and after some editing, he published it here: A History of Ultrasonic Record Cleaning - The Vinyl Press. A link to the article is in his preamble. The interesting bottom line for me is that it has been understood straight away that vinyl is an imperfect medium even as I prefer it. The development of the compact disc actually falls out of that recognition at the same time, the early 1960s.

While I love vinyl, I also recognize that for lps I listen to a lot, I make a 96/24 recording on a Tascam DV-RA1000HD. From there, I make a mini-lp that I play on my CDP. Saves about $3.50 per lp play that way.

See this example of what I like to do:
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Thank you for writing that great post. I wanted to add to what you wrote and share what I have learned over the last few months.

 

I would play that record everyday for a year, or more, then buy a new record.

 

Oh course you would.

Hank Mobley on Blue Note 1568 | eBay

 

Thanks, but all I did was pass on Henk's work to the forum. The effort was all his.
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