I have a Lomas AC2 pickup, which fits a standard Edison mount. This is a very well made device, and is fine for recording most cylinders. However it struggles a bit with shrunken records, and as I collect Lamberts and other early indestructibles I needed something which could cope with cylinders of 'non standard' size.
I made up a couple of tone arms for recording cylinders, using an Edison Home and a Standard. I am far from professional as far as engineering is concerned, but after a fair amount of filing and the use of model maker's tools, bearings, etc the contraptions work fairly well. The basic idea is to mount the tone arm assembly on the carriage rod and use a light counterbalance weight to keep the half nut on the feedscrew. The carriage runs on pullies and small ballraces. Motor noise can be filtered out using cheap software - I use Magix Audio Cleaning Lab, which does all the jobs I need for cleaning up cylinder recordings.
One arm uses a Shure 44, the other a Stanton 500. Both use styli from Expert Stylus for both two and four minute cylinders. Tracking weights can be adjusted, but about 3-4 grams seem to be about right. I did try a very short arm on the Standard, to see if arm moments were an issue on distorted Amberols, but the longer arms seem to work better.
I have found that while the clockwork motors on the Edisons are very good there can be a little flutter which becomes apparent on long violin notes and the like, so I have put a little electric motor in the Standard and this works fine. A simple electronic control kit does the trick to get the right speed. If anyone is interested I can post better pictures of this.
All very amateur, but it works. Easy to use, as the arms act like any other turntable deck. Clearly not an Archaeophone, but a bit cheaper! Hope this is useful.
