不同類型的唱針及其對您轉盤的意義

If you decide to pass a slow moment by looking at a cartridge manufacturer’s website (and while you are free to judge me any way you see fit for doing this, your own browser history is likely to tell its own story of less than dynamic moments in your lives), you might notice something odd. Many companies will make what appears to be two (or sometimes even more) cartridges that are identical in every way except for the shape of the stylus—the tiny diamond that sits in the groove of the record and begins the process of turning that groove into an audio signal, and with that, the price being asked for them. These aren’t small price differences either. Changing the stylus profile can often nearly double the price of the cartridge.

So why are these differences so significant? The answer to this is—by the standards of vinyl anyway—pretty straightforward, but it makes the most sense with some context. First, what is the stylus? At the most basic level it is a piece of industrial diamond that has been shaped to a point and sits at the end of the cantilever—the object that transmits the signal it creates back to the cartridge. In essence, almost every cartridge (there are of course a tiny number of exceptions but they are sufficiently rare that we can ignore them for now) works on these principles. In very basic cartridges, the stylus attaches to the cantilever by means of a metal shank which slots into the end of the cantilever. This works well enough but increases the weight and mass of the assembly in the cartridge, which isn’t ideal. More sophisticated designs will use what is referred to as a “nude” stylus that affixes directly to the cantilever and reduces this mass.