small stylus
Referring to the small stylus, to track a record groove, in the early 1970s, I owned a phono cartridge made by a company called "Empire". It had THREE stylii that could be interchanged easily:
- A narrow elliptical stylus for tracking lower than is usual in the groove.
- A wider stylus for tracking higher than is usual in the groove.
- A normal sized spherical stylus.
The idea behind the wider and narrower stylii was that you could track lower or higher than the usual stylus, thus avoiding presumed groove wear or damage.
The spherical stylus was used for playing a limited number of record brands which were "predistorted" for spherical stylii. Back before the advent of elliptical stylii, there was a problem with distortion that increased towards the extreme center of the records due to a "pinch" effect...the shorter wavelengths towards the center of the records were harder to track with spherical stylii. Several companies, (I think London and Decca were two of them) added an inverse distortion to compensate for this.
When the elliptical stylus was introduced, it could trace the shorter wavelengths more accurately. BUT, London and Decca records had higher distortion, because they were optimized (pre-distorted) for spherical stylii.
For that reason, the top of the line of the Empire cartridges had all three stylii as mentioned above.
I was using it with an AR-XA turntable, tracking at about 1/2 a gram. It was GREAT!
Dave Kimble