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anyone else running vintage Empire carts?

Those are high ears, like the ones on my 888 PE. The ones with low ears put the ears ~level with the rest of the body, as in the earliest ads for the 888s. Zoomy. I think Empire must've made the change when customers complained they had to use thick spacers to get the stylus bottom ~parallel to the record surface. You can see that this body design has the potential to scrape some vinyl in the event of a warp.
1965 ad.jpg4 crop-E.jpg 9a with spacers.jpg
I don't know if plastic ears ever made it to the early 888s (888, 888 P, 888 PE). The 888E did get them.
 
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KSM74 said:
I bought two Pfanstiehl 235-SDE on E-Bay. This is what arrived. It's a shame that the 999TE didn't fit my 999VE/X. The TE has a 1 mm longer shank. And for the 888TE needle, the 888PE body is already on its way.
Click to expand...
Yes, this is very strange! As someone quite familiar with Empire fitment issues with both tri-8 and tri-9 versions of the 'snouters', it begs for more investigation. Looks like a good homework assignment I can work on this weekend. It'd be nice to come to some consensus on this conundrum.
 
wualta said:
Those are high ears, like the ones on my 888 PE. The ones with low ears put the ears ~level with the rest of the body, as in the earliest ads for the 888s. Zoomy. I think Empire must've made the change when customers complained they had to use thick spacers to get the stylus bottom ~parallel to the record surface. You can see that this body design has the potential to scrape some vinyl in the event of a warp.
View attachment 3535854View attachment 3535822 View attachment 3535846
I don't know if plastic ears ever made it to the early 888s (888, 888 P, 888 PE). The 888E did get them.
Click to expand...
I tried getting a hold of a NOS yellow PE stylus a few times, years ago. Always got outbid. I wanted to see how good it was for the time, being Empire's best around 1965 or so. I read somewhere that it's a .2 by .9 mil nude elliptical. Would be cool to see how it compared to newer carts made by Empire and by other makes as well. I have an 888p with the orange .6 conical that has the low ears. I did have to put a spacer on it eventually too, to fix the 'ride height'. It sounds good with a 999VE/X stylus on it since the inductance on it is fairly high at around 600mh. A good 'ol heavy war horse.
 
I just discovered the main Sansui engineer who designed the

AU-717
AU-917
AU-907D
AU-X1
AU-X11
AU-X111 MOS
B2301
C2301
AU-D11ii
AU-907x

amplifiers was a big fan of the Empire 4000Diii cart & stylus: he used it in his personal reference system ( along with a Technics SP10 TT and a JVC arm ) while designing all those amps. And for years afterwards, throughout the 1990's & 2000's.

His main audiophile collaborator during those years used the same TT/arm/cart setup too.

So there is Empire DNA in all of those Sansui's
 
And don't forget the Sansui ES-10 cartridge, an Empire 2000E-family clone, specifically the Empire EP-10. Can't find photos of the cartridge-- I only know about the model because of styli made for it
 
Yes, they must have, but I still don't have a photo of it labeled as a Sansui in the same way that we have photos of the Marantz, Pioneer, Toshiba and Unitron clones.
 
And I believe it's the 2000 "smokey" that's being emulated, the same stylus found on the Empire EP-10. Would be interesting to compare.
 
Again with the 66 clones in markets presumably outside the US! Just stumbled over the Mitsubishi 4500 Z EEE, most likely a clone of the 66E/X, taking an S906E base elliptical. Can I find a photo of the cartridge body itself? I cannot. Only a bunch of Euro sites selling styli of various colors with some trying to sell you a ATN3600. Holy frijoles.
 
KSM74 said:
I bought two Pfanstiehl 235-SDE on E-Bay. This is what arrived. It's a shame that the 999TE didn't fit my 999VE/X. The TE has a 1 mm longer shank. And for the 888TE needle, the 888PE body is already on its way.
Click to expand...
I ran this experiment and had similar results. The 999tex stylus at around 6mm is a millimeter longer then the 1000zex and 999vex, which are the same. I put the 999tex stylus into the 999vex body. It wouldn't seat all the way, as KSM74 said, but as long as azimuth was checked, it played fine. It was even louder in the 999vex body then it is in its own body, probably because it literally goes in as far as the body will allow, and due to the considerably higher inductance. Then I tried the 1000zex stylus in the 999tex body. The little tab fit better on the particular exemplar I was using, so it actually did output a decent amount of volume. Not as much as a 999tex stylus, and not as much as when it's in the correct 999vex body, but was acceptable. I then rinsed and repeated with the 999vex stylus in the 999tex body. Same results as the 1000zex. Less output, but acceptable. Then I remembered the generic 999vex styli I got a while back. They're from Astatic, and I always found them to be lower in volume in the 999tex bodies then real or generic 999tex styli. So I measured them, and they are in between at 5.5 mm in length. When used in the proper 999vex body though (which for some reason, i apparently never tried), output is right where it should be. So it seems that these 2 exemplars of Astatic generic 999vex styli were actually designed for the 999vex body, even if it was just by using a shorter insertion tube like the originals do. Imagine that.
 
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Mare see! et voyla!
My little bit of tid was a byproduct of my prowling about for tests/specs of Empire models that somehow escaped the US audio magazines. No shortage of tests of the 1000 ZE/X, of course, but I admit to being overly entertained by the term "aimant induit" and hoping someone will write a song with that as the title. One can dream.
The strange thing is that the 1000 ZE/X isn't strictly an induced-magnet design-- the soft-iron cone isn't acting the part of a permanent magnet as in, say, an ADC XLM but rather disturbing a fixed magnetic field in which the pole pieces are so to speak immersed.

Doug G, I now task vous with testing the 1000 ZE/X on a disque à quatre canaux discrets, s'il vous plaît. :D
 
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