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Are these needles meant for one play only or multi-use? Also, the bend of the needle would make the angle of attack much sharper than the standard 45 degrees. Would this not be very damaging to a record?

The Laubscher Melograph needles had not been made for the usual 78rpm discs made out of shellac, but for the home-recording discs "Melograph" made out of gelantin. Don´t use those curved needles with the ordinary shellac dics!

Melograph was a (semi-professional) home recording system from the early 1930s and in use in the Swiss, Austria and Germany. To play the gelantin discs (after cutting) you needed those curved needles.

More about this system here with our German site:
http://grammophon-platten.de/page.php?500

You can use these needles also with other, semi-flexible discs from the late 1920s, 1930s made in Europe like Phonychord, Goodson Record and so on.

As said previously, curved needles are to be used with specialty electromagnetic pick-ups and are not intended for normal use on normal gramophones.

My best guess is that the curved shape was inteded to give to the needle a decent needle-to-groove angle during playback, because the curve of the needle would compensate the almost-vertical arrangement (clearly seen in pictures and in patent's applications) of the Melograph pick-up. If a normal needle would be used to play back, it would have approached the record surface almost vertically and would have digged into the groove, as while recording.

My advice is once again not to use curved needles with ordinary records / soundboxes / pick-ups.

The truth of the matter is that these specific laubscher mellograph curved needles are much gentler to shellac records than the ones you find in today's market. Just experiment as I did, play records with them and you will reach your own conclusion.

And my point still holds, that Laubscher kept these needles in production way after recordable discs and electrical pickups disappeared from the market, and during a period when the only market for non-permanent needles was portables. These needles may have started their production for specialized use, but soon the manufacturer found that they could be used on shellacs and be sold to a larger market.

These curved needles are known as trailer needles, in the UK at least. Some discs, especially from direct to disc recorders, were too soft to be played with ordinary needles. I have a couple which have, inscribed around the label edge, "Use fibre or trailer needles only". They work perfectly well for this purpose in an acoustic soundbox and are nowadays recommended by some people for the playback of worn records.

I personally have never heard of the suggestion that they should only be used in electrical pickups.

Just my two penn'orth

Torjazzer wrote:Also, the bend of the needle would make the angle of attack much sharper than the standard 45 degrees. Would this not be very damaging to a record?

You use them 180 degrees rotated from what you are suggesting.

bulleid_pacific wrote:These curved needles are known as trailer needles, in the UK at least. Some discs, especially from direct to disc recorders, were too soft to be played with ordinary needles. I have a couple which have, inscribed around the label edge, "Use fibre or trailer needles only". They work perfectly well for this purpose in an acoustic soundbox and are nowadays recommended by some people for the playback of worn records.

I personally have never heard of the suggestion that they should only be used in electrical pickups.

Just my two penn'orth

This has been my experience as well. I usually play discs with thorn needles, and when the disc is too worn for the thorn I use these trailer needles or the straight laubscher needles as well, always with good results.

bulleid_pacific wrote:These curved needles are known as trailer needles, in the UK at least. Some discs, especially from direct to disc recorders, were too soft to be played with ordinary needles. I have a couple which have, inscribed around the label edge, "Use fibre or trailer needles only". They work perfectly well for this purpose in an acoustic soundbox and are nowadays recommended by some people for the playback of worn records.

I personally have never heard of the suggestion that they should only be used in electrical pickups.

I agree. I've always understood that trailer needles were made for those brown "floppy" 78s (I forget the proper name), that were quickly destroyed by straight steel needles. They can be used in both acoustic soundboxes and electric pick-ups. The "Songster" ones that I have are clearly marked "Use once only"

Barry

The brown records were known as "Hit of the Week" in the US and "Durium" in the UK. Wikipedia (who trusts them? ) suggest that the actual fabrication material was "Durium". In any case I have a few single sided records like this. There are often two songs on the single side. They usually warp and need a weight over the turntable spindle to play. Trailer needles work well, but I don't think they'd last as many plays as shellac discs with an acoustic soundbox....

No offense intended to anyone, but I'm still persuaded that this thread is based more on personal beliefs, habits and common sense than on facts or period information.

Durium / Hit Of The Week records, as far as I know, were mass produced, and even in respect to the technology deployed they have little or nothing to do with Melograph records, which are one-off instant recordings.

Despite being printed on a cardboard layer, Durium / Hit Of The Week records were robust and durable and, again as far as I know, were intended to be played with standard soundboxes and needles. Although I appreciate the fact that some listeners play them with "trailer"/Melograph needles, I've never seen written on any Durium / Hit Of The Week record, ad and/or tech paper that they were intended to be played with curved needles. Contrarywise, Hit Of The Week also marketed a needle bag which contained standard straight needles, quite obviously to be used with Hit Of The Week's records.

On the other hand, third-parties like Herold report on their catalogues that their curved needles were to be used in conjunction with "self-recorded discs" (Herold Original square box, bottom line, text in German, English and Spanish), like the Melograph or similar products.