Magic Eraser pickup cleaner

I have continued doing some research on visually inspecting the stylus.  I found a nice thread where a gentlemen describes a project where he built an appropriate microscope system for examining phonograph stylus.  The thread is on another audio site so I won't post the link here.  However, an interesting piece of information is what led to the building of the microscope. In the heyday of vinyl, Shure was of course a well known phonograph cartridge company. Shure produced some test equipment for audio shops to test and examine cartridges.  One piece was the PEK analyzer which could measure performance of a phonograph cartridge while it was connected to a phonograph player and playing a test record (also supplied by Shure).  The other piece was a microscope called SEK that was built for Shure by some optical company and configured specially for examining the stylus for wear. The important part about the microscope was that in had to have good lighting from the sides and above the stylus, the platform had to be able to adjust in small increments and the magnification needed to be capable of 200X in order to detect wear.  So a cartridge was lined up at a lower magnification to get it centered in the view finder.  Then the magnification was increased to 200X to view wear spots. The wear spots show up as bright areas from the illumination lamps.  The inspection of the stylus tip also has to be straight on from the top. I did find a link to a PDF user manual for the

mexking wrote:

Magic Eraser pickup cleaner here

I can’t believe it happened again! 🤩

I am currently having issues with my unloved S120.2 speakers in that they need re-foaming. However while examining them carefully I noticed that the right speaker had NO woofer response of any kind and the treble was barely audible.

That starting me thinking, well your problems with these speakers are worse than just re-foaming. So I checked both ends of the speaker connectors…. Not the problem.

Then I changed sources but everyone was talking away on the FM so that didn’t help and the 8-Track player is of such dubious quality that I couldn’t really see (hear) what I needed.

I tried the balance control and I seemed to have almost no right channel and it hit me, OMG the receiver has blown its right channel. Now I really was upset. 😭

However even with my memory heavily cloaked with senility, this whole scenario seemed just too darn familiar.

So I took out Bang & Olufsen's magnificent record cleaner, the MMC 6000 from my Beogram 8000 and sure enough it had a bouquet of garbage surrounding the stylus.

Once cleaned the speakers work just fine, the receiver is fine….. and I feel like an idiot. Now in my own (sort of) defense the first time the sound quality was terrible in both speakers. This was different in that the left channel was normal, but the right channel had NO bass whatsoever and just the slightest treble….. I literally had to put my ear to the tweeter to hear anything.

I doubt anyone else will have this sort of scenario; however I, for one, have learned before I go into full panic again over this particular system to remember to check the 6000 cartridge first before anything else and save myself a whole lot of unnecessary trouble. 😳

Jeff

I clean the stylus after each record, and inspect them using this.

soundproof wrote:

I clean the stylus after each record, and inspect them using this.

 

 

Most impressive to be sure. 🤒

However isn’t there a very real danger in removing the cartridges more than absolutely necessary? I have read that both the arm receptor and the MMC cartridges themselves are fragile.

As such I try my best NOT to remove them more than necessary.

I use my Beograms on a consistent daily basis, thus removing the cartridge two or three times a day would, in my opinion be asking for trouble….. and with five Beograms an awful lot of work. I think I’d have to have OCD to enjoy that!

Jeff

Piaf wrote:

soundproof wrote:

I clean the stylus after each record, and inspect them using this.

 

 

 

 

Most impressive to be sure. 🤒

 

However isn’t there a very real danger in removing the cartridges more than absolutely necessary? I have read that both the arm receptor and the MMC cartridges themselves are fragile.

 

As such I try my best NOT to remove them more than necessary.

 

I use my Beograms on a consistent daily basis, thus removing the cartridge two or three times a day would, in my opinion be asking for trouble….. and with five Beograms an awful lot of work. I think I’d have to have OCD to enjoy that!

 

Jeff

 

If you haven't tried it yet you will be amazed at what can be done by adding a cheap magnetic / self adhesive close-up lens to a mobile phone camera or iPad. Either view on screen or take a picture.

Graham

Great thread you started :-)  I've had decks and used my MMC20CL and MMC1 with them.  Then was forced to go back to 'normal' quality stylus because just could not get used to all the extra 'stuff' that the top quality stylus brings out.  Better detail of course but more clicks, pops, hiss (from the original tape masters) than I could cope with. LPs WILL just always have all of the above so I vote to stick to the middle of the road approach and sit further back ;-)

Just found this old bookmark, it might be interesting:

Thanks, all my LPs are pristine and do sound very good except for the ones that were pressed slightly off centre, as used to happen sometimes.  And when you took them back to the shop and they played them and said, "what's your problem...?"  mainly because there were no scratches etc and the old dear in the shop couldn't hear any 'wow' it used to annoy me endlessly :-(  So I do look after my LPs and CDs but the CDs are much easier to rip to MP3s, which is what we all listen to these days anyway, isn't it ?  :-)  Rgds