The Talking Machine Forum — For All Antique Phonographs & Recordings

Does anyone manufacture new tungsten styluses? I’ve got some old ones but they seem to wear out quickly. Thank you!

No, not that I'm aware of.
If however you're wanting to use tungsten to play records, it's probably worth searching for an Everplay needle.
They use a coil of tungsten wire that can be fed to the playing tip as the wire wears down.
I've never used any of mine but apparently they're a popular choice for use with early record changers, and tungsten wire of the same gauge is still available so you can replace the wire coil once the original is used up.

A note on the Everplay- I have a few and find them very useful, but primarily on acoustic machines. I've tried them on many different types of electric pickups (acoustic and crystal) and they produce a pretty harsh sound, especially on higher frequencies. The culprit is the wire coil and wheel to turn it (the unit resonates quite a lot). When using on an electric changer I have a piece of rubber similar to viscaloid that is lightly compressed by the top of the wheel and bottom of pickup. I got this idea from some of the pickups in RCA phonos that have the viscaloid damening strip around the thumbscrew. This eliminates the harsh ringing sound, but to my ear is not as fine sounding as a good steel needle. However, this does allow me to utilize the auto changer on some of my pickups too heavy for a Bent Shank Sapphire needle. The Everplay on acoustic machines is perfectly fine- it sounds like a medium to loud tone needle depending on the brand you typically use.

Thanks so much for posting this information.
As someone with absolutely no experience using an Everplay, you've saved a lot of trial and error on my part if I ever do decide to use one of mine.

Very interesting. They sound expensive! I’d give one a try if I could find one. In the meantime I was able to get some new old stock online for a good price.

Does anyone know about how many plays a tungsten needle tip should get before wearing out

Thank you!

My experience with tungstone/tungstyle needles been to only play about 50 sides on average.
Certainly nowhere near the 250 plays they claimed these were capable of.
I have found playing fairly worn records will wear the tip quicker, so perhaps if you were to play brand new discs that were acoustic recordings with not too many loud passages they would last a lot longer?
But 250 sides I think was a bit far fetched.

Not having used my Everplay needles before, I'm not sure how many sides you'd expect to get out of a complete coil of wire, but I think you could reasonably expect somewhere in the range of 500-1000 sides.
Perhaps Zkeener could give us a better idea of just how many sides you could expect from an Everplay on average?

As for price, I remember some years ago Brandon was selling his NOS Everplays for $100 each, and I seem to recall seeing some at $80 each.
Depending what it costs now days to buy NOS Tungstones, it may be worth looking around for an Everplay, even though the initial outlay will be more.

I've never used tungstyles, except for one or two trials. I only have two or three, plus a dozen samples, all different in a roster, from Vallorbes needles, some of them several tones (thicknesses) of needles that seem to be of the tungsten wire type, but their shanks are of square cross-section, of all things! I've never used them, they're stored in an exhibition card. But that's another story...
What I mean is that maybe the prospects of tungstyles being capable of 250 plays each is not uncertain when you play only acoustic Victors, which were the standard records by the time the tungstyles were introduced. Even they could have advertised that duration thinking of the Red Seal records, made of the finest shellac. In this context, could it be not so uncertain...? the tungstyles were introduced far before the electrical recordings, somewhat 1911 or so....???