The Talking Machine Forum — For All Antique Phonographs & Recordings

This isn't an acoustic/wind-up question, but I'm hoping someone here might be able to help nonetheless. Can anyone recommend someone in the U.S. who can restore or replace crystal cartridges for electric pickups authentically, i.e. with new crystals? Westech doesn't do it; I hear there's a fellow in Germany who grows his own crystals and does restoration on cartridges, but I also hear his workmanship is very shoddy and his crystals usually break fairly quickly. (Plus there's the hassle of sending something overseas, where it can't be tracked or insured.) Has anyone here ever had any luck finding either new (recent vintage) or NOS crystals that were usable? If you own a restored crystal pickup, how did you do the restoration (other than retrofitting a different type of cartridge)?

Any leads and/or guidance would be most appreciated!

From the little bit of research I've done
on this topic, it would seem that these are
most likely crystals of Rochelle Salt.

Lots of luck with that.

I've got a couple of electric Dictaphones
which have crystal elements.

The hand held unit has a crystal which acts
as a mic. and as a speaker.

The record/playback head has a crystal.

These units can be disassembled. They are
disassembled now. The crystals were all
disintegrated. They had turned into a white powder.
(No, I did not attempt to snort the white powder...)

<lame attempt at humor>

My impression of it so far is that if anyone
wants to repair these, they will have to
learn how to make their own Rochelle Salt
crystals.

You can poke online at Youtube vids and around
places such as Sciencemadness.org which is
a forum for chemists.

Grow your own. Experiment.

That looks like the only way.

I have waited few days just to see if anyone would come across with some decisive idea, but my opinon that crystal cartridges "are not forever" has only been confirmed. They have never been a long-lasting product, and even if repaired with replacement crystals, again they will not last very long.

In my opinion, whenever feasible, crystal cartridges have to be mercilessly replaced with ceramic cartridges, until these are available somewhere (again I don't know of anyone, factory or burgess, who's still producing them, and quite obviously they're getting scarcer and scarcer).

There has been a time in which extra-small cartridges with built-in sapphire tips were relatively easy to find. In those days I ventured on installing them inside irrecoverable big cartridges (see an example in the pictures below). However, it seems that also these extra-small cartridges became progressively harder and harder to find.

Marco Gilardetti wrote:They have never been a long-lasting product, and even if repaired with replacement crystals, again they will not last very long.

Like most subjects, I know little of this one but when I was a kid, messing with my mom's old Rca 45 player and her goofy records was a frequent rainy-day pastime. The crystal cartridge had to be about 15 years old by then and was still playing well. -bill