I bow to your greater knowledge and experience Marco, many thanks! I guess I was assuming the head of the turntable in question was an early one, the type of which most are cream in colour and twist to change styli, as opposed to the later black/silver type with the flip-under styli - but I could be wrong - and I don't know whether the change coincided with the move from Rochelle salt to ceramic, but I suspect that might be the case.Marco Gilardetti wrote:Dear Andy, I don't know if you're aware that not only rochelle salt was used in these cartridges, the latter ones were made with a ceramic crystal even though exteriorly they look nearly identical. Ceramic crystals are not as sensitive to humidity like rochelle salt was. I would say that rochelle salt pick-ups stood fairly well until the '80s, but on my experience their failure rate is at least 90% today, while the failure rate of ceramic pick-ups is nearly 0%, and the few that failed were basically broken due to mechanical reasons, not due to a failure of the crystal itself.
When I was younger and more spare parts were available and I used to do really crazy things in order to resurrect dead machines, I "implanted" a small crystal spare stylus inside a bigger dead cartridge. Quite amazingly the sound was pretty good. However, the crystal stylus proven to be very fragile and used to break whenever the arm fell accidentally (not such an unfrequent event with those records that don't feature a run-in groove).
I must say in the past I've been surprised several times by how good these little Philips players can sound. They seem to punch above their weight.