Aftermarket stylii manufacturers & quality

[jawaligt]

Perhaps a topic like this already exists. If so kindly point it out to me.

My idea is this: one of the drawbacks of vinyl in todays world is that for many of our favourite MM cartridges, stylii made by the original manufacturer are no longer available. Thus we are often stuck with aftermarket stylii. Some of these are good, some are even excellent (approaching or even surpassing the quality of the original product in some cases), some are in all honesty garbage.

Even though the quality among aftermarket manufacturers varies wildly, there is little information available about the relative merits of their products. Now I know this is a very confusing market, but the numbers of manufacturers isn't limitless and neither are their products.

So.. wouldn't it be good to try and get a thread where we can talk about the different manufacturers and our (subjective) evalutation of the quality of their products. It may be of help to fellow audiophiles who are in the market for a bargain

Let me start by naming two of the manufacturers I know:

Normarh: these are made in Colombia and tend to come up on ebay. I ordered one of these for my Ortofon VMS cartridge. The stylus was crude (quite large with a lot of bonding material and a very very tiny diamond). But also, it was grossly tilted to one side causing a very audible distortion in one channel. I exchanged it for another one with the seller, but this one had the same problem. So I concluded his products aren't up to par and opted for returning it for a refund. So it seems Normarh is a brand to avoid.

Tonar: these are generally considered to be good products depending on their source. Tonar has sold OEM stylii under their brand name.

I would like to invite you all to add your experiences..

[flavio81]

Normarh: these are made in Colombia and tend to come up on ebay.

Those are crap. Avoid completely.

[syncopeter]

Tonar has been around for quite a while and has a good reputation. They have negotiated a deal with Nagaoka to make different sizes of styli for the MP series of cartridges to play virtually every type of disc. You simply cannot close such a deal with a major Japanese manufacturer if you're not a very reputable firm. They supplied every good HiFi shop in the Netherlands in the 70s, 80s and 90s with replacement styli and have survived to the current day. They had to diversify during the lean years, but they still are here, so yes, I would trust them. They have quite a reputation to lose. Of course they too are dependent on what is available, but in over 35 years I've never heard of a serious problem with aftermarket styli from Tonar and if there was one it was solved to mutual satisfaction.   

[ReD]

Jico often gets mentioned & they offer a very broad range of aftermarket styli.

my experience so far is with their bottom end elliptical, & their top end SAS, neither of which exactly replicates the tonality of the original Shure styli. They are both however very good & the SAS is in some cases exceptional both for soundstage & clarity. The SAS is remarkably different in tonality to the original.

I've just ordered the HE stylus to see how close that comes to the original.

In the UK there's Mantra - I haven't bought from them for a decade but an Ortofon FF15E was very good apparently Swiss made

[ReD]

I think This link was posted here with a recommendation (could have been VE)

Other than that I know nothing about them but they seem interesting & not extortionate

http://www.pickupnaald.nl/index.php?page=Homepage

[tomatamot]

I think This link was posted here with a recommendation (could have been VE)

Other than that I know nothing about them but they seem interesting & not extortionate

http://www.pickupnaald.nl/index.php?page=Homepage

And in English too: http://www.pickupnaald.nl/index.php?setCurrentLingo=GB

[jaspert]

I think This link was posted here with a recommendation (could have been VE)

Other than that I know nothing about them but they seem interesting & not extortionate

http://www.pickupnaald.nl/index.php?page=Homepage

I just received my Azden shibata stylus from them this week.
Well packed and nice product. Good to deal with.

[syncopeter]

I forgot to mention that Tonar only sells wholesale, so as a customer you have to buy via a dealer like www.pickupnaald.nl

[richard]

Good topic, Jasper, and you've written nicely about it.

In my experience with aftermarket needles, as a general rule, the quality of the lowest-type needles has been fairly decent. But as the quality and precision of the original manufacturers' styli go up, the quality of the aftermarket replacements go down.

Remember that I said general. There have been exceptions. I know of three American aftermarket needle companies, all now defunct, which brought in high-quality replacement magnetic styly from Japan.

The quality of the final product, however, can be a surprise. We often think that because a product has this or that vaunted feature, that it will be excellent. But this is like the story of the blind men and the elephant.

So, let's see. We'll take these features:
- Shibata jewel
- Nude mounting
- Perfect "torsion moment"
- Highly-polished diamond

Oh, boy: it's a great needle, right?
Wrong! That was the cantilever/tip assembly, which was installed out-of-alignment in two planes into a mounting tube so oversized that it will almost split the cartridge body apart. Otherwise, a superb stylus.

Arrrrrgh!

I found, too, that just because a stylus manufacturer makes an excellent replacement for one stylus doesn't mean that their replacement for another stylus of the same cartridge maker will be equally as good.

So, I'll write again, that it's really important to find out all the details that you can think of from the seller in advance. If you don't know, for example, the tip size, you can't evaluate what you're listening to. And it's useful to know who actually made the needle and where they're located.

[GP49]

I found, too, that just because a stylus manufacturer makes an excellent replacement for one stylus doesn't mean that their replacement for another stylus of the same cartridge maker will be equally as good.

I have found that just because two aftermarket styli are of the same brand, they may be from different manufacturers.  A crapshoot, indeed.

[jloveys]

The problem is that we all think that stylus and cartridge repair is the only thing we cannot do ourselves.
So we depend on others commercial companies to do the job. Of course, working on microscope and tiny instruments is scarry, but David opened my mind about this. He has glued a broken cantilever by himself on one of his Denon 103 and it was delivering awesome music after the repair.
So why not a DYI cartrige repair guide for dummies ? I am sure that we all have hidden skills in that obscure domain...

[Kent T]

Yes indeed, aftermarket styli vary from very excellent to horrid quality. The more expensive and complex the stylus needed is, the likelihood of the aftermarket being garbage is higher. Jico and Tonar presently are reliable suppliers. Pfanstiehl is variable and not always that good. Richard can tell us much more about aftermarket US companies than anyone else here.

[richard]

Kent wrote,

Pfanstiehl is variable and not always that good. Richard can tell us much more about aftermarket US companies than anyone else here.

I have to confess that the more that I know about aftermarket needles, the more that I realize that I don't know. As Gene implied above, the entire field of aftermarket needles was not run by pride or ethics, but was more often than not, aimed at retail dealers who valued bottom price above everything else. And there were then, as now, no regulators. It's always had a Wild West element to it. Many of these products were sold in record shops. There were three "points of sale" that the manufacturers sold to:
- record shops
- electronics parts stores (real ones, not Radio Shack)
- hi-fi dealers, for low-end walk-in customers and for magnetic brands that the dealer didn't have a regular relationship with

Pfanstiehl used to make their own styli. They were one of the largest in the business, and their catalog was more useful than the others. The cost of assembling this catalog, checking it and proofreading it, and the cost of maintaining the quality of their products was higher, which meant that they could easily have been undercut by others who didn't put the care into their merchandise or their listings. Astatic was also more reliable. The electronics dealers around here all carried Astatic, and I was upset when my nearest shop dropped Astatic for Zafira: she made much more profit on that brand, and refused my attempt to reason with her even when I said that I would not buy needles from her any more if she didn't change back.

Note that Pfanstiehl is no longer the same company. I believe that the present incarnation of it has the capability to manufacture needles, but I believe that they are importing a percentage of them. Brian sent me four that he'd bought, two of which were unacceptable, and one of these two fell apart.

People have sent me their bad needles now and then, so I can evaluate them. This has been useful, because I have been able to spot trends this way and write about what I've found. One dealer sent me new samples to evaluate, and I've noticed that, whereas they were acceptable when I received them, their elastomers have deteriorated over a few years. This really is a crap shoot.

"Send me your tired, your Shure."

[jawaligt]

I really appreciate all your responses, let's keep this thread going .

It would be nice to learn something about repairing our broken stylii ourselves. It would seem to me that the actual process of manufacturing a cartridge body or grinding the diamond tips in the right shape is much more complicated than actually glueing them on and/or installing them.

Richard, I really agree with what you've said. Even with high quality stylii with expensive profiles it's entirely possible to get a 'dud' where the diamond tip and/or cantilever are twisted to the side. If you consider how much can (and does) go wrong there and add that to the myriad of variables that have a role when the user is installing a cartridge (vtf, vta, sra, compliance, overhang etc etc) sometimes it seems like a miracle to me that they're still capable of making music

[jloveys]

Just lost the stylus on my Allaerts. Jan Allaerts is asking 900€ to replace it. A Fritz Geiger FGS stylus that now is sold by FG Switzerland already glued to the cantilever, so Jan buys the combo and he says it us the most expensive part of the cartridge. OK, but I wonder if I just send it to Expert Stylus and put. Paratrace stylus if I will hear any difference. Anyway I sent it to Benz Switzerland who will put a FGS on it for much less than Allaerts ...
So many differences in price , like Lyra in Japan adking the price of a new cartridge just for retip ?