Cartridge life really only 3 years??

HI,
Having the advantage of using a purpose designed stylus microscope for many years and having run a high end repair shop, I have an opinion about stylus life. On the average a stylus will last about 1000 hours. As the the stylus gradually wears, the points of contact against the groove walls develop flats, called wear facets. These first become visible under high magnification at about the 1000 hour mark. This hour count remains true no matter the stylus shape or brand. After all, a diamond is a diamond and they are all the same as far as wear resistance is concerned.

As the facets become more prominent, you will start to hear distortion similar to inner groove distortion. The wear facets have sharp edges and act as a chisel on the groove. Continued use will damage the groove permanently.

A good stylus microscope is the only way you can see the wear facets. Forget about hand held and low power magnifiers. They just will not work. I designed and built a DIY stylus microscope which is capable of clearly showing the facets at the early stages of wear. I wrote up this DIY microscope project and it appears as a sticky on the Audio Karma forum. Here is the link.

http://www.audiokarma.org/forums/showthread.php?t=225960

After you use one of these purpose designed scopes you will never again be tempted stretch the life span of your stylus. You will replace it promptly. Your records will thank you.

Sparky

HI Viridian,
I think you are being overly conservative where there is no practical reason to be so. I have never seen a stylus show wear under the microscope at 800 hours. However, in this game, being conservative is better than pushing the stylus past the point where it is causing record damage. So, I will just say that you are wasting some of the useful life of your stylus. If that's OK with you then it's OK with me. It's a bit more of an issue when we include very expensive moving coil cartridges in the discussion. For example, I would not want waste a single hour of life of my $3500 Clearaudio Discovery cartridge.

BTW, my hours count (1000 hours) is strictly based on experience with my own styli. They are the only ones I can keep close track of use. While in my repair shop, where I examined thousands of styli under the microscope, I had no way of knowing their hour count. But based upon the 1000 hour standard, the vast majority of the styli I saw in my shop were worn far past the point of prudent replacement and had many more than 1000 hours on them. I always pointed this out to my customers but left the replacement decision to them. I know their styli were causing audible distortion and damaging their records. But as is said, you can lead a horse to water but you ..........!

Sparky

I have never counted the total number of sides played with any cartridge I've owned. Does anyone count or do we all just average? How expensive is a proper scope? Audiofeil, how many times have you retipped your cart?

Not really on the subject here but one of the reasons I bought the Ortofon 2M Black was because it can be easily retipped at home. You can also choose between a Shibata or Nude Fine Line stylus as well.

This is scaring the heck out of me. Now I have about $6000 invested in analog and I am contemplating selling it all because the cartridge I have chose as my ultimate reference can only be traded in for new with a 20% credit. That only provides about $1.80 per hour return in investment. This is my major concern in staying with analog as a reference source and seems like a bad investment because of the cartridge wear.