What is the difference between SAS, shibata and microcline?
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tubewade
Super Member
grotty, gusten, there is a most excellent thread by flavio81 about these and other stylus shapes over on another forum. Use your search engine to search for "advanced stylus shapes" and you should be led right to it. There is a wealth of information there with lots of answers to stylus questions. Just in case you hadn't seen that before, I thought it would be of interest to you..
Wade
Wade
ETI_5000
Super Member
Shibata was the first generation of extended line contact tips, developed by JVC for CD-4 quadraphonic cartridges, which need a frequency response up to 45kHz. Because conical and some thicker elliptical styli are too thick to perform well at those frequencies, a new thinner stylus shape was needed. JVC developed the Shibata in conjunction with Namiki Jewel, who made the tips for JVC, and JVC patented it and named it after their engineer who was involved in the work, Norio Shibata.
It’s called an extended line contact tip (usually abbreviated to line contact) because the vertical length of the contact patch up the groove wall is much longer than elliptical or conical styli, and because the contact patch area is much larger, one side effect was that it wore less, and created less record wear. Other advantages included lower distortion that elliptical or particularly conical stylus tips.
It was later developed more, and there was a Series 2 Shibata which was improved, although I don’t know what the exact differences were. Because it was patented and quite expensive, very few companies used it apart from JVC, except for rich ones like Audio-Technica (the world’s largest cartridge maker) for a while, and Sony.
Other companies developed their own similar line contact tip shapes which had similar advantages, resulting in a lot of quite similar designs that didn’t infringe JVC’s patent, but were cheaper than using the expensive Shibata. Among those were:
Then in the 1980’s Namiki came up with an even better design, the MicroRidge (MR). It still hasn’t been bettered, and Audio-Technica use it on their best cartridges, but re-name it the MicroLine (ML). A lot of other companies have also used it on their very best cartridges, including Benz, Dynavector, Grace, Lyra and Shure. Jico also used it on their best aftermarket styli, and re-named it the SAS, or Super Analogue Stylus, which has just been discontinued due to difficulty sourcing some parts. All of the MR/ML/SAS tips (same thing) are made and supplied by Namiki to the various manufacturers, who attach them to their cantilevers and assemble them into styli or cartridges.
Namiki seems to be the only company with the technology to produce these ridge-type styli, although others such as Fritz Gyger have got close with similar designs. Because of the ridge, the part which touches the record is much thinner than conventional styli such as the Shibata, or elliptical or (especially) conical tips.
The microridge has got ‘ridge’ in the original name because of the extremely thin ridge around the bottom of the stylus, where it touches the record. Here’s a picture of what it looks like – you can see the ridge in the picture.
One advantage that the MR/ML/SAS tips, and some other better tips like the Fritz Gyger and van den Hul, have over the Shibata and some earlier line contacts, is that the width of the tip where it touches the record doesn’t vary as you move vertically up the side of the tip – it’s the same thickness all the way up, as you can see in the picture above. According to A.J. van den Hul, the thickness of the Shibata varies between 4 and 18 microns, depending on the height, so it's rather poor in relation to later line contacts - it was very much a 1970's first generation model.
Incidentally, van den Hul has accused some of these other manufacturers, such as Namiki, Ogura (another Japanese tip-cutter) and Fritz Gyger of copying his design, and there may be some slight truth in that. But whether or not the MR, Fritz Gyger, or Ogura PA stylus shapes are descendants of the van den Hul tip, we'll probably never know.
It’s called an extended line contact tip (usually abbreviated to line contact) because the vertical length of the contact patch up the groove wall is much longer than elliptical or conical styli, and because the contact patch area is much larger, one side effect was that it wore less, and created less record wear. Other advantages included lower distortion that elliptical or particularly conical stylus tips.
It was later developed more, and there was a Series 2 Shibata which was improved, although I don’t know what the exact differences were. Because it was patented and quite expensive, very few companies used it apart from JVC, except for rich ones like Audio-Technica (the world’s largest cartridge maker) for a while, and Sony.
Other companies developed their own similar line contact tip shapes which had similar advantages, resulting in a lot of quite similar designs that didn’t infringe JVC’s patent, but were cheaper than using the expensive Shibata. Among those were:
- Hyperbolic – Shure (only ever used on their CD-4 cartridge, the M24H)
- Hyperelliptical (HE) or Hyper-Ridge (HR) – Shure (NOT an elliptical – it’s Shure’s line contact)
- Paroc (Parabolic Oval Cone) - Weinz
- Pramanik – B&O (also named after the engineer who developed it)
- Stereohedron – Pickering and Stanton
- van den Hul – A.J. van den Hul (this is one of the best)
Then in the 1980’s Namiki came up with an even better design, the MicroRidge (MR). It still hasn’t been bettered, and Audio-Technica use it on their best cartridges, but re-name it the MicroLine (ML). A lot of other companies have also used it on their very best cartridges, including Benz, Dynavector, Grace, Lyra and Shure. Jico also used it on their best aftermarket styli, and re-named it the SAS, or Super Analogue Stylus, which has just been discontinued due to difficulty sourcing some parts. All of the MR/ML/SAS tips (same thing) are made and supplied by Namiki to the various manufacturers, who attach them to their cantilevers and assemble them into styli or cartridges.
Namiki seems to be the only company with the technology to produce these ridge-type styli, although others such as Fritz Gyger have got close with similar designs. Because of the ridge, the part which touches the record is much thinner than conventional styli such as the Shibata, or elliptical or (especially) conical tips.
The microridge has got ‘ridge’ in the original name because of the extremely thin ridge around the bottom of the stylus, where it touches the record. Here’s a picture of what it looks like – you can see the ridge in the picture.
One advantage that the MR/ML/SAS tips, and some other better tips like the Fritz Gyger and van den Hul, have over the Shibata and some earlier line contacts, is that the width of the tip where it touches the record doesn’t vary as you move vertically up the side of the tip – it’s the same thickness all the way up, as you can see in the picture above. According to A.J. van den Hul, the thickness of the Shibata varies between 4 and 18 microns, depending on the height, so it's rather poor in relation to later line contacts - it was very much a 1970's first generation model.
Incidentally, van den Hul has accused some of these other manufacturers, such as Namiki, Ogura (another Japanese tip-cutter) and Fritz Gyger of copying his design, and there may be some slight truth in that. But whether or not the MR, Fritz Gyger, or Ogura PA stylus shapes are descendants of the van den Hul tip, we'll probably never know.
marcmorin
RIP 1953-2020
several things often over looked with extended line contacts are.....1st, the contact line if not perfectly vertical in the groove modulation can/will read more than just that modulation at that moment. Which is TIM, and that's the bane of the spherical in the upper frequencies.
l/l/l/l/l/l/ l\l\l\l\l\l\
negative rake positive rake. And that isn't always only a problem with vta , but also occurs with stylus scrubbing due to warp. in the article posted in another thread from Shure about the development of the hyperbolic, and hyper elliptical they go into some pretty good detail about this.
savatage1973
Addicted Member
Great info and history lesson!!!
ETI_5000
Super Member
Yes, that was another line contact. LAC = Large Area of Contact, in other words, extended line contact. Another one I didn't mention was ADC's Aliptic.
Yes, line contacts are much more sensitive to VTA, so require more careful alignment.
Conical styli also suffer from the problem called Pinch Effect, where as the groove narrows due to modulation it becomes wider than the conical stylus, so pushes it up towards the top of the groove. That's shown well in figure 3 on this page http://www.audiomisc.co.uk/HFN/LP3/aroundthebend.html . That was one reason why elliptical and line contact styli were originally developed, as their thinner shape didn't suffer pinch effect as much.
