Comments and impressions about my diamond styli set.
Posted: Fri May 04, 2018 3:53 am
This is a follow-up to a previous thread.
I finally had the time to do some testing. I waited for so long to really gather the money that I needed to have the styli retipped by Expert, and then waiting for the goods to go back and forth from Italy to UK, that I could select a good bunch of "test records" in the meanwhile. So what I wanted to do was pretty clear in my mind, although this may not necessarily be my final take on this matter, and I may change my mind later, after a longer and more intense use of the set.
On these premises, in my opinion, the most evident fact is that if the record has permanent wear caused by overused steel needles or such, trying to track the grooves "upper" with a wider diamond is useless. Distortion will still be all there, and to make things worse surface scratches will become more hearable. In my experience the only possibility to improve the sound is the other way around: to track the groove deeper than normal, with a thinner diamond. The sound improvement is perceivable but it is however, in all cases, limited: I could not get an all-round "good" sound from any of the worn-out records that I tested.
What so far I couldn't seem to find good use for are the wider diamonds. The 35mil, in particular, was warmly recommended to me. I tested these diamonds with a selection of the oldest well-kept records that I own, and the 4.0mil diamond seems to play them well, but in turn the 3.5mil and 3.0mil seem to play them just as well, and in most cases the 2.5mil would also play them well, with no evident swishing on the bottom of the groove.
When playing records that, in my mind, would be finely matched by the 3.5mil truncated diamond, I could hear almost no difference than when I played them with the 3.0mil non-truncated diamond, or when I heard any difference it was so subtle that I asked myself if it was just self-suggestion.
Coming to the the 2.5mil diamond, it indeed has plenty of use with later 78 records made in the '50s. These are tracked so well that I wonder if a 2.0mil diamond could still track them well, and perhaps with some improvement in respect to sound distortion caused by previous groove wear.
In short: I am very happy with the thinner diamonds that I selected. Countrarywise, I couldn't find a real use for the wider diamonds. As said, I am aware that the latter require further testing, and I might change my mind at a later time. Also, people with a record collection different than mine or mostly produced in another country could draw different conclusions.
This said, if I had to do it all over again, I think I would leave out the 3.5mil or the 4.0mil diamonds, and take a 2.0mil diamond instead and see what happens. Smaller diamonds seem to be more useful, at least with with Hi-Fi equipment, than larger ones.
Should anyone had the patience to read through the whole post, I'd be glad to read your comments, opinions and suggestions on this matter!