What Digital Stylus Force Gauge Do You Like?

Dweller,

Some (not all) Shure gauges were made from magnetic material. Not the ideal choice for this application! When you find yours, check it with a magnet before trusting its results.

P.S. I have a spare 50g calibration weight. Anyone with a digital scale that calibrates @ 50g who needs one, please email me.

I had a Winds and it was great. I sold it a few years ago and have a Cartridge Man Digital Guage now. It works well. It's easy to use. The shortcoming is that the stylus must be dead centered on a depression in the little weighing pad to be accurate. When the stylus rests on any other part the results are different.

Overall, very good.

Dweller, I'm a believer that the gauge only gets you into the ballpark because the optimal VTF setting must be set by ear and must be determined through iterative adjustment and listening as VTA is dialed in because the two settings interact. At the risk of repeated my comment in another thread on this same topic... I've always followed Lloyd Walker's recommended procedure for fine tuning turntable setup: http://www.walkeraudio.com/fine_tuning_your_turntable.htm

So for me, greater accuracy than the Shure provides is irrelevant except in one situation: If one has multiple arm wands and needs to easily move from one to another, being able to re-establish quickly, easily and with great accuracy a predetermined optimum tracking force makes sense, and there are gauges out there that are more repeatable with precision than the Shuure. But in my opinion, that pre-determined optimum tracking force will have been determined in an earlier "dialing in by ear" process. In this case, the important factor is the gauge's repeatability of measurement (i.e., the ability to get precisely the same result over multiple measurements), not its absolute accuracy of measurement.

Hope you enjoy getting back into vinyl!

Thanks for the responses guys. I went on to the link for savonscales that Nsgarch posted. They have many scales. Which one do you guys suggest? As it turns out, my scale is a "My Weigh" MX 200. Saveon sells my weigh scales, but my MX 200 has since been replaced. My scale weighs to .1 gr. My problem is that it has no weight supplied with it, so I cannot check the accuracy of the scale. I bought it off someone on Audiogon a while back.

Slowhand, I already picked out two possibilities for you:

The Jennings JS-50X or JS-100X should do the trick at $35 or $50. I think they come with calibration weights. Double check that, but I'm pretty sure.

Neil

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