The Secret Society of Lathe Trolls

cuttercollector · Joined: 11 Jun 2006 Posts: 307 Location: San Jose, CA

Perhaps this is too obvious and all of you have tried it or use it already, but here goes.
I just got a 2nd 3 speed recordette and as those here that use them know, they have almost nothing (well actually nothing) in the way of cutter arm adjustment. There is a spring on the later ones which reduces the tracking force in playback mode but nothing else really. It was all designed to work, more or less, with their little thin records cut with a steel non microgroove stylus at 78 rpm.
So, I have this pile of misc. old cutting styli - mostly steel and not microgroove and I just wanted to see which (if any could be made to make a quiet unmodulated groove on some ok 10" lacquers I have around.
The normal proceedure involves making a test cut and listening to it. After trying this on a few and getting down to rotating the turtable a little by hand to eliminate a few that just made an obvious scrape or did nothing, I started to think - wait - this machine uses the same transducer for record and playback! So, with the arm in the raised record position but the selector switch in the phono playback position I tried listiening to my cut as I made it at various speeds with various styli. It seems to work. Ideally if you are cutting a perfect groove you will hear - NOTHING - !
Of course I have not been able to do that but it will help in determining how far to insert the styus (slight angle adjustment), adding or subtracting weight, results at various speeds with various materials and styli etc., even revealing turntable rumble issues etc. Just get it as quiet as possible listening AS YOU CUT!
I then extrapolated that this should theoretically work for any non-feedback cutter. I have not tried this yet and I know it is not as easy as the selector switch on the recordette with it's single crystal cutter/cartridge, but it wouldn't be that hard for most of us to take the output of our cutter and temporarily wire it to some sort of preamp/amp and listen to it's output while trying to cut a quiet groove. Any transducer will work to some degree either way. I am not talking about setting eq or anything complex here, just listening to your cutter as it mechanically contacts the media and getting the noise as low as possible.
What do you think?

Doug 6N · Joined: 21 May 2007 Posts: 66 Location: Washington

Hi Cuttercollector:

This is something I'm going to try with my next new stylus. I've heard of this before but have never actually done it. On my Presto all I have to do is plug the cutter into the pickup input. Like you say any regular old amp will work for this purpose. Quiet groove would equal proper angle depth of cut etc.

Doug

JayDC