Any Recent Developments for Pickering D3000 Stylus?

mbose

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Just finished cleaning up an Empire 398 with a nice cartridge but no stylus. Searched the forums and saw that there might have been a reasonably priced replacement in mid-2015, but it looks like that one is gone.

Can anyone recommend a good sub-$100 replacement?

Thank you,

Michael
 
If your 398 is typical of the model and doesn't have anti-skate, I'd stay away from any line contact stylus. Elliptical is as "high end" a shape as I would go. In fact, I'd say needlestein's second suggestion would be best for you as the 980 arm is kind of massive and the more VTF you can use with a given cartridge, the better. (Unless it's a Shure with their Dynamic Stabilizer feature.)
 
I want to ask a question here, though. The Japanese Pickering style line contacts I have, whether Jico, LPGear, Walco, or others (I have a few), all seem to come from the same place over the decades of manufacture that my collection spans. The one thing I have noticed is that any applied antiskate on my Technics arm will move the stylus cantilever off center. So I run mine without any antiskate at all. Would this make the Empire 398 a possibility, if arm mass weren't a problem?
When you say off-center, do you mean it bends the cantilever over time?
 
Well, I don't know about over time. I haven't run one long enough because I switch cartridges all the time. What I'm talking about is immediately observable. You set your VTF to 1.5 for example, and the AS to match (not running the brush let's say) and you drop the needle. You will notice immediately that the cantilever goes off to the side a fair bit--like a quarter of the stylus gap. If you back off the AS, it centers again. You can do this all day. I can't remember which direction it goes off to, but I'm going to say towards the spindle since the AS is trying to counter the inward pull of the tip by increasing outward force. So, when you increase AS, the cartridge moves outward and the cantilever stays in place.

The effect is immediate. Even one gram shifts the cartridge outward. The only way to keep the stylus in center position relative to the cartridge is with a 0 setting. Originals don't do this, and to my knowledge, I don't have any other styli like this.

I do have some old Empire 888 cartridges with the opposite problem. They must have been run on a table like the 398 for a while as all the styli are warped outward, but if I set AS to 3 while running the cartridge at 1.5, the tip centers and plays fine. Lots of life left on the original styli. Someone kept buying new carts instead of new styli, because I got a stash of three of these from the same seller all with the same problem. Estate Sale find.
Hmmm...wonder if it has to do with the aftermarkets not having a tie-wire in the construction which makes the whole assembly less stable. I remember seeing a similar motion as you describe on a Shure V15III I used to own (with an OEM stylus) but that had more to do with trying to run the cart in an arm way too massive for it. Once I put it in a SME arm, that stopped.
 
I want to ask a question here, though. The Japanese Pickering style line contacts I have, whether Jico, LPGear, Walco, or others (I have a few), all seem to come from the same place over the decades of manufacture that my collection spans. The one thing I have noticed is that any applied antiskate on my Technics arm will move the stylus cantilever off center. So I run mine without any antiskate at all. Would this make the Empire 398 a possibility, if arm mass weren't a problem?

Just wondering what is the approximate time line ?

Seems to be less choices today, wasn't there some HE, Shibata and finer stylus. :) :idea:
 
@needlestein this is really great information and much more than I expected! Thanks you!

@empirelvr thank you for your comments. I do have the anti-skate adjustment. From what I have read, the tonearm tracks well with minimal tracking force. Has that been your experience as well or are people overstating how the original arm performs?

Regards,
Michael
 
Just a follow-up, I decided to get the 4822-DEE and to take a chance on the eBay N890E at that price. @needlestein, did I understood right that the N890E will fit the XSV-3000?

BTW, the turntable does have a D3000 on it now, but it is in bad shape from storage.

Thanks, again.
 
@empirelvr thank you for your comments. I do have the anti-skate adjustment. From what I have read, the tonearm tracks well with minimal tracking force. Has that been your experience as well or are people overstating how the original arm performs?

Regards,
Michael

The arm does track well with minimal force, but this is a case where just because you can, doesn't mean you should. An arm as massive as the 980, no matter how well designed and smooth and friction free the bearings, isn't an ideal candidate for mating with a high compliance cartridge. (And a Pickering XSV 3000 is a fairly big mismatch...even with a functioning "Dustamatic" brush.)

Using a cart that tracks at one gram in that arm like the Pickering will work especially since it has the anti skate thread and weight, but will give you a skewed frequency response and possible tracking issues because the arm/cartridge resonance frequency will be in the wrong range. Warps and other disc eccentricities would only exacerbate the mismatch. Unless, like I said above, you use one of the Shure carts with their dynamic Stabilizer/brush mechanism (way different and more sophisticated than the Pickering brush,) which would damp that resonance and let you track at one gram with no downside either mechanically or sound wise.

But for any other kind of pickup, I'd go with one that tracks ideally at 2 grams, maybe a bit above.

Having a 980 with the thread and weight anti-skate does open up being able to use more sophisticated tip profiles though, so you scored on that front. :thumbsup:
 
@empirelvr, thanks for the clarification. I was really taken with the Empire at first sight, and after months of searching drove 6 hours to buy this one. It is cleaned up and has new grommets, I will be starting another thread with some questions about more detailed adjustments, and would appreciate your help there as well. I have a few documents from the web, but not everything is covered in what I have found.
 
@empirelvr, thanks for the clarification. I was really taken with the Empire at first sight, and after months of searching drove 6 hours to buy this one. It is cleaned up and has new grommets, I will be starting another thread with some questions about more detailed adjustments, and would appreciate your help there as well. I have a few documents from the web, but not everything is covered in what I have found.
Well then, in case you didn't see it, this is *the* thread for all things Empire Turntables: http://audiokarma.org/forums/index.php?threads/some-empire-turntable-history.278075/

I'm sure a lot of your questions will be answered somewhere in there. :)
 
... An arm as massive as the 980, no matter how well designed and smooth and friction free the bearings, isn't an ideal candidate for mating with a high compliance cartridge. (And a Pickering XSV 3000 is a fairly big mismatch...even with a functioning "Dustamatic" brush.) ...the Shure carts with their dynamic Stabilizer/brush mechanism (way different and more sophisticated than the Pickering brush,) ... would damp that resonance and let you track at one gram with no downside either mechanically or sound wise. ...
Agreed on all fronts. Recently it's been demonstrated that it's possible to add fluid (as opposed to friction) damping to the Dustamatic brush. Take a look at this thread over in the Lencoheaven forum where Pat Semeraro gets things started and our own boreas picks it up and runs with it. [UPDATE: I've done this mod to my own XSV 3000 and it works beautifully.]

A caveat: fluid damping is good because it's progressive, but it can't perform miracles. To take an extreme example, I wouldn't expect top performance from the original hypercompliant XLM in a massive arm with friction-free bearings (the lack of bearing friction means any resonant behavior will be that much less damped); fluid damping will help in such a situation, but it won't make the combination ideal-- it won't be able to significantly damp out the infrasonic peak when the cart-arm mismatch is really big. But fluid damping is always helpful, as long as you don't overdamp.
 
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Interesting information about fluid dampening, @wualta. Beyond my level of understanding for now, but something I will add to the (long) list of things to research.

For the immediate decision on which stylus to buy and how to configure it, does the specific arm resonance (stated by Empire to be 8 cycles) play into the decision of whether to use a brush at all?
 
...For the immediate decision on which stylus to buy and how to configure it, does the specific arm resonance (stated by Empire to be 8 cycles) play into the decision of whether to use a brush at all?
I'm a fan of the Pickering/Stanton brushes so I always use them. Empire's spec has no real bearing on the issue. :)






See what I did there? :naughty:
 
I'm not sold on adding viscous damping to Pickering/Stanton brushes. I think the long hairs provide damping whereas the Shure short whisker bristles provide little damping and need the viscous hinge damping.

YMMV
In my tests using a Shure Audio Obstacle Course LP the Pickering and Stanton brushes provide very little, if any, dampening.

There is a big difference between the Shure and Pick/Stan brushes. Pick/Stan were brushes first, made to get rid of dust. Any other by-product of that is incidental. Shure is the opposite. The brush fibers are there to act as the point of contact for the viscous hinge dampening. The fact they used very fine carbon fiber bristles that also act as a disc sweep and static drain are totally secondary. They could have used a fibrous pad strip like Discwasher's DiscTracker did. (Although it is true in certain ads of the time Shure sold the idea of the Dynamic Stabilizer being a brush to clean discs much, much harder than the dampening function for some reasons.)
 
Here's another tidbit about the N890E. It goes both ways, too, just like the Pfanstiehl. The magnets are big enough that it generates adequate signal, unlike other MM styli in MI bodies. So here's an example of a Stanton/Pickering stylus that works in both the MM bodies and the MI bodies.

Thanks for confirming this! The seller that you linked to claimed that it worked in MI bodies in his rather long description, but I was dubious. I couldn’t pass on picking one up myself.
 
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