Orchorsol wrote:Yes and yes!
Thank you very much Orchorsol, in this case I will be very glad to accept a small sample of your fibre needles, thank you! I will send you a PM with my address.
epigramophone wrote:One argument against fibre and thorn needles which I have read is that they generate excessive heat, which according to their detractors burnishes the record grooves and eventually leads to loss of detail. I am no scientist, but I do know that steel is a good conductor of heat and that wood is not.
Indeed this is a point that I forgot to mention, although it doesn't worry me very much. As you anticipated, the heat generated by a steel needle is rapidly conveyed to the chuck, and from there to the soundbox, which is a massive metal object that acts as a very efficient heat sink. This doesn't happen with fibre needles, which as you have correctly written are a heat isolator: the heat will stay there where it was produced. And finally, being shellac compounds moldable with heat, the heat may melt and deform the grooves.
I think, however, that should this damage be really conspicuous, there would be a general consesus that fibre needles should be avoided, while many people are enthusiast about them. Incidentally, this recalls me that with Hi-Fi microgrooves sometimes I saw reported data like temperature and pressure at the tip on loud passages, and they were out-of-this world figures, I don't remember them exactly but it was like hundreds of degrees and a ton per square inch. As a physicist, I believe that these figures, which have no practical meaning for the end user, are reported only to impress people and confuse matters that would be otherwise fairly easily understood. It is absolutely obvious that vinyl would melt/pierce at temperatures/pressures like those mentioned, but as this
never happens and people all over the world happily enjoy their
microgrooves, it will be understood that the matter at "micro" scale doesn't behave as it would at "normal" scale. It is interesting to note that this characteristic of the matter was already observed and described by Galileo Galilei, and perhaps by others before him. He made the example of a wooden crane engineered to lift (say) 1 ton without crashing, and he compared it with a scale model (say 1:100) of the same crane layout made with the same material, observing that the scaled-down model could lift without crashing wheights much heavier than those calculated just dividing by the scale. That is: smaller objects are
by nature stronger than their bigger counterparts. This is basically why "nano"-scale technologies are considered so promising since at least two decades, although I have yet to see any nano-object that may have a signifcant impact over my everyday life, but we'll see what future brings. Also, this is why ants can lift objects much bigger than they are, although the documentary speaker will unavoidably talk about their unbelievable force in order to impress the audience, systematically forgetting to mention that they're helped by their small size. But we're digressing.
Summarizing: although it is very likely that fibre needles produce more localised heat than steel needles, it is however observed that this excess heat is mostly unharmful. I suspect that the small scale at which this all happens, helps the matter to deal with it.