a bit OT: Will a 78 rpm record damage a normal stylus?

Of course the obvious thing to do is take a note of the titles the label details and the number of the disc. The chances are that somebody has already done the conversion and restored it. You would be surprised at what a simple search can turn up. I had a horrible recoding from a 78 of Petula Clark singing make Way, a very well known song with many different lyrics, and it was dire, but a quick search found it already converted pretty cleanly and even available from Amazon to stream. It was on what I used to joking in latter years call the dead parrot label, called Polygon. Brian

Someone, somewhere will have an old wind up grams phone that can play the thing. Try asking your local Facebook group

Of course I probably could. But that?s rather missing the magic of ?playing a record?, especially one found under a hedge. ;-)

Tim

Does that means that a piezo cartridge has a very high impedance, suited to valve amps? I used to have a transistorised table radio with the obligatory "gram" input that worked all right with a piezo cartridge. Maybe quality wasn't an issue.

Does Youtube have it?

You could also play 78's using hawthorn thorns instead of the standard steel ones (which were much the same length and diameter). Not sure if this was for economy, or to reduce record wear, or whether some considered that it gave a better tone.

You can get high impedance with transistors too.

It will work after a fashion. But the smaller stylus will bottom on the groove and not give the best results. Which likely won't matter much.

A more "woody" sound. Otherwise you get a "tinny" sound.

AKA low-pass filter. I don't recall how effectively it reduced scratch noise.

I rather enjoy the Paul Temple series on R4E with the little music breaks for the record changes, and the still distinct sounds of scratches in spite of all the wizardry when they were transferred (presumably to tape before digital).

They are effectively a voltage source in series with a capacitor, so input resistance of the sounds-card is critical. They are normally made a value to minimise pickup, high in terms of normal needs but low in comparison with preferred input resistance for a ceramic/crystal cartridge.

This explains better than I can.

These were "turnover" styli, Others, including Philips, used a rocking stylus. 180 degrees versus about 20 degrees.

One of the latter turned up on BBC Repair Shop a few weeks ago. The bodge repair was to file down a turnover stylus that could then be jammed into the de-gutted rocking's case.

PA

Fair enough.

But I stopped restoring audio from my own vinyl for any track I found I could get online!

The makers of fibrous (natural material) needles used to advertise them as providing warmer tone and reducing wear.

If that's the kind of stuff he came out with I'd put the record back in the hedge.

Another Dave

Well its typical of the lower class entertainment of the times. Today we have rap which is arguably even worse

The same site (arrived at by a Google search), has an amplifier based on a 2N7000.

The location of the amplifier is important too. The amplifier and its nine volt battery, should be positioned near the phono arm, where the wire comes off. The circuit doubles as a "cable buffer", and then you can run a suitable cable from there over to the Line In on the destination device. Without that, if you put a hundred feet of cable right off the phono cartridge, the frequency response would be missing all treble. By using the amplifier up near the arm, it functions as a low impedance cable driver. I still would not try a hundred foot of cable though, six feet would be plenty.

The phono cartridge is electrically floating. The amplifier and nine volt battery are floating. A desktop computer sound card has a grounded input, and it is the ground on the computer sound card that is the only ground in the circuit. (We need this knowledge, to avoid ground loops.) Any tube amplifiers are not involved, as long as the phono cartridge is no longer connected to any tube amp inside the player device.

In cases where a media device is ground referenced at the source, and you seek to input to the computer Line In, a "hum breaker" can be purchased, to isolate the source from the computer. This is used to break the ground loop (stop hum), but at the expense of mutilating the frequency response (passes up to around 10KHz). The transformer must be carefully wound for best results in those. When you use things like battery powered cassette players, then those are floating, and the computer is the only ground in the circuit.

There are softwares for hobbyist usage. The first one is mentioned in web reviews regarding computer audio. And Audacity is a general purpose tool.

Paul

No argument here. My mother was from Irish stock. For some strange reason we celebrated Hogmanay with effing Harry Lauder and effing Jimmy Shand. I can't stand Lulu either.

Another Dave

The line card input is 10Kohms, not the higher value others have recommended as a starting point. That's a pretty heavy load.

I've never built my own phono amp, so can't comment on whether Line In on its own is good enough.

You'd want a calibration recording (a 78RPM with sweep waveform on it), to be able to do an end-to-end determination of goodness. Whether using 10Kohm LineIn by itself, or using some intermediary device. Listening by ear, that "something needs a compensation curve", is a lot harder.

The selection of 10Kohms for LineIn, is based on expected sources. Computer outputs can be anywhere from:

In all those cases, of expected input styles, the 10Kohms is sufficient when dealing with those, and does not unduly load them. That's how they decided 10Kohms was a good value. Nobody considered using the sound card as a photomultiplier tube amplifier or something. They didn't intend it as a lab oscilloscope. They could easily have done that, if they wanted.

Computer sound was never given the ability to work with dynamic (magnetic) input devices at the 2mV level. The amplitude is too low, even with microphone boost turned on, to work properly. But the 70mV from a ceramic cartridge might be sufficient from an amplitude point of view. I bow to others on the value of input impedance required to get the piezo cartridge to follow the input properly. Anything I've plugged into the sound card, was usually already buffered to one extent or another. My one good computer microphone, has a four pin amplifier chip inside, and the sound card doesn't need anything special for such inputs.

Paul