Stylus tracking problems?

[bart1927]

To your last point. That's probably the cantilever being too flimsy. You need something solid there to deal with the forces it has to deal with. A concern if you retip a standard 33 stylus for hard 78 duty.

I have the modern Shure (green) tip mounted on a Shure M97 xe cartridge that I use for casual listening to all kinds of 78's. But with that Shure stylus it still shakes around on tough (off cneter) records because the cantilever is kind of soft, and forget about warped records. I track about 3 ½ grams and never have seen the need for more. Depends on the total mass of the arm, though.

Actually, those Stanton styli are pretty solid. Don't forget that all those white body custom styli for playing 78's sold by Nauck, Kabusa and (probably) others are in fact retipped lp styli.

I also have a Staton stylus with a black body, specifically designed for playing 78's. It's only 2.7 mil and not truncated, but it has a higher tracking force. The lp styli track at 2-5 grams, this one tracks at 3-7, so it probably has a slightly sturdier cantilever.

So I tried it on one of those off-centered records, and it didn't make much of a difference as compared with a retipped lp-stylus, skip-wise. With tracking set at 3 grams, they both skip the first couple of grooves, at 3.5 they stay in place, but you can still hear a faint popping sound, and at 4 grams, the problem is gone. I guess I added the extra gram at one time just to be sure. Probably best to set it back to 4 grams, so I don't put any unnecessary strain on the cantilever.

You're right, the arm may also have something to do with it. I have an Esoteric Sound CVS 14, which is actually one of the many Technics SL1200 clones, made by OEM-manufacturers in China. It has served me well for over 8 years, but I guess an actual Technics may be a bit more solid.

[Shlomo]

Bart,

Do you happen to use microfiber cloth to clean or dry your records?

I'm asking because I've started to encounter the occasional swishing again too. I've lifted the turntable arm a few times whenever this happened to look at the stylus through a 30x scope, and in most cases, I can see the outline of a fine, twisted fiber around the tip that looks very similar to microfiber cloth, which I use to dry my records.

Shlomo