Turntable stylus longevity

Special care is required for the longevity of your turntable stylus. The first defense against the early demise of your needle is to make sure you never allow your needle to get scratched sideways across the record or player.

A more long-term threat to your needle is excessive tracking force and/or misadjusted anti-skating adjustment. If your deck has a couple dial adjustments at the back end of the tonearm, then you are in luck! The anti-skate dial is usually on the surface of the deck and controls the side-to-side pressure of the diamond tip within the groove of the record. The tracking force dial is integrated with a counter weight at the rear end of the tonearm, and controls the up and down pressure within the groove of the record.

If you don't know what the adjustments should be, then the rough adjustment is 1-3 grams tracking pressure, and then adjust the anti-skate to be equal to the tracking pressure. This will float the turntable stylus in the middle of the groove.

Most needles can come equipped with a variety of different tips. Metal, osmium, sapphire, and both man-made and natural (or nude) diamond comprise the list of various tip materials, listed in order of least to best quality. LP tips which play 16,33 and 45 rpm records will range from .5mil to 1.0mil in the conical variety, with .7mil being the most common. A 1.0mil tip is for mono recordings only! Whereas .5 to .8mil tips are for stereo records. The part number suffix is -D7 for a .7mil diamond tip, or -S1 would be a sapphire 1.0mil tip etc.

An -S2 is a universal compromise tip for all speeds, not great for record longevity. A -D3 or -S3 is a diamond or sapphire 3.0mil tip which is a 'wide groove' tip designed only for 78rpm records. Those are the usually 10inch in diameter records made of acetate in the early 1900's before the advent of 'microgroove' vinyl LP records.

Thank you for coming to our site to read more about your phonograph stylus. Feel free to browse our categories to find what you need.