Re: OT: diamond making machine for 200,000 dollars on alibaba

The cost of a replacement stylus is in the manufacturing, not the materials. There are brand-new mass-produced styli for microgroove records available at around 30 UKP - but I've just paid over 90 UKP for a specialised one for 78s. For an even more specialised L.P. profile I was quoted 120 UKP.

They had no choice. That was back in the days when natural diamonds were the only game in town, De Beers controlled the price of these gems and only Superman could make them artificially (from lumps of coal IIRC).

Liz, can you recommend any genuinely good, high quality stylus/cartridge manufacturers in Yurp currently? Preferably English or Scandinavian?

I don't really know much about the esoteric end of the L.P. market, but a good general-purpose workhorse would be something from the Shure 75 or

You need to consider the sort of record you intend to play, presumably you are thinking of microgroove, not coarse-grooved 78s, or similar? For older records and those with damage, a conical stylus might pick up less noise than a top-of-the-range elliptical or similar. Some high-end styli are very fragile, so they might be damaged more easily.

A friend who works at the very top of the transcription business uses a moving coil cartridge by Wilson Benesch, which is hand-made in the UK and claims to give the ultimate in performance. It needs a special pre-pre amplifier as the impedance is less than 30 ohms and the output voltage would be down in the noise level of a moving-magnet pre-amplifier. He keeps it for only the highest quality work and uses a Shure 44 for the 'ordinary' jobs.

Elliptical styli will only give the best performance if they are angled correctly to the .line of the groove; despite all the hype, there is no radial pickup arm that achieves this, so a parallel-tracker is an absolute 'must' (especially if you are using some types of analogue de-clickers).

Audiophiles will pay big money for stupid things. Best example I have seen is they will pay around $ 100 for about 6 feet of some special wire to go from the eqipment to the AC receptical. Little good that does when there is 20 to 50 feet of cheap copper or even aluminum cable from there to the breaker box and other junk cable back to the power pole.

Not sure about the diamonds usen in the record players but industrial diamonds aver vey cheap. It is just the stuff they can sell to women that they get a large amount of money for. Had it not been for them to convience women they needed them they would still be very cheap cmpaired to what they are now.

Very true. Likewise speaker cable. I managed to get *very* many yards of excellent low-loss 50 ohm millimetre wave coax cable at a very reasonable price from some audiophool who'd been using it as speaker cable. He must have had incredible hearing, that guy. ;->

Also very true!

Excellent; many thanks.

The business of speaker cables sounding different may have had some passing acquaintance with the truth. Apparently the crossover networks in loudspeaker assemblies can present the amplifier with zero impedance under certain circumstances and may even try to feed stored energy back into it.

Under those conditions it wouldn't be surprising if the impedance of the cables and the current-limiting behaviour of the amplifier output stage produced audible differences, even thouigh tests under 'normal' conditions, with resistive dummy loads, failed to find any difference.

The cheapest answer is to have a separate amplifier for each loudspeaker drive unit and do the crossover with active filters ahead of the power stages. With amplifier chips being fairly cheap,it is easy to build them into the speaker enclosures. For even better results, tailor the frequency response of each amplifier to suit the particular drive unit and cabinet.

The only disadvantages of this method are the need to distribute the signal at low level and to have a power supply to each loudspeaker box.