@halcroĀ
Last year I wiped out my Koetsu on my secondary turntable - rummaging through my parts bin I found a couple of Talisman S from the 80's.Ā Interestingly one was mint original, the other had been retipped by Garrot Bros.
What blew me away was when cleaning them up and checking the stylus condition, the original, which had a nude mounted diamond in a sapphire cantilever, struck me as a work of art - both stylus and sapphire tube were as clear as crystal and there appeared to be no glue at all, the joint was seamless, and I could see straight through both the tube and stylus as if there were nothing there - if you have seen an xray of a pin embedded in a bone, thats what it looked like, except crystal clear.
When I look at the current price of moving coils - most dont have nude mounted styli until you get to the upper levels and there are some very expensive MC's out there with huge dobs of glue stuck on the end of the cantilever with a diamond embedded in the glue.
It does make you wonder how important what type of cartridge screws you use or how long you left the angels hair wire used in the coils in the sacred vat when all said and done the stylus, trying to the measure the microgroove vibrations, whilst generating humungous amount of friction, is mounted in glue.
I wonder if Namiki or whoever still makes cantilevers/styli are delivering to the standard that was being delivered back in the mid 80's. Our audio market is so miniscule in the scheme of things.Ā
If they could do this in the 1980s before CNC machines, 3D Printing and Computer-Controlled Lasers.Just a correction - Namiki was using lasers to manufacture nude mounted styli in jewelled cantilevers back in the 80's I believe - for example the micro ridge/microscanner styli in sapphire cantilevers.
Last year I wiped out my Koetsu on my secondary turntable - rummaging through my parts bin I found a couple of Talisman S from the 80's.Ā Interestingly one was mint original, the other had been retipped by Garrot Bros.
What blew me away was when cleaning them up and checking the stylus condition, the original, which had a nude mounted diamond in a sapphire cantilever, struck me as a work of art - both stylus and sapphire tube were as clear as crystal and there appeared to be no glue at all, the joint was seamless, and I could see straight through both the tube and stylus as if there were nothing there - if you have seen an xray of a pin embedded in a bone, thats what it looked like, except crystal clear.
When I look at the current price of moving coils - most dont have nude mounted styli until you get to the upper levels and there are some very expensive MC's out there with huge dobs of glue stuck on the end of the cantilever with a diamond embedded in the glue.
It does make you wonder how important what type of cartridge screws you use or how long you left the angels hair wire used in the coils in the sacred vat when all said and done the stylus, trying to the measure the microgroove vibrations, whilst generating humungous amount of friction, is mounted in glue.
I wonder if Namiki or whoever still makes cantilevers/styli are delivering to the standard that was being delivered back in the mid 80's. Our audio market is so miniscule in the scheme of things.Ā