Are Ceramic Needles Bad
What exactly is titanium nitride.
Are ceramic needles bad. With over 800 ceramic cartridge types from which to choose your journey for the right ceramic pickup is near an end we know it is hard to match the right cartridge to your player. Ceramic hybrid needles take the sting out of shots date. You can gently brush your finger against the needle of very old 50s era electric record players and it ll hardly move as it is connected to the crystal. A titanium coated needle is simply that a hardened metal needle with an ultra thin titanium nitride coating we re talking micrometers thin.
These also tend to have the flip over needles for both wide grooved 78s and microgroove 33s and 45s. I m assuming this is a ceramic needle since from what i have been able to learn over the past several months magnavox used ceramic needles for quite some time. Ceramic cartridges to use a bit of vinyl elitist hyperbole are the devil. Since these bearings are constructed from many materials they often operate in hybrid capacities.
This is not something that unique to crosley turntables but it is a terrible bit of technology. New polymerization technology may one day take the pain out of injections and. My mom s sears console stereo still has it s original ceramic cartridge and it will be 50 years old next spring and it still plays though i wouldn t play any of my precious records on that machine i would think that signs of failure could be a variety of things like a change in output level a change in channel balance distortion and so on. In most cases you will save time trouble if you proceed only if you are sure your cartridge is bad.
Home ceramic flip needles. A ceramic cartridge also has a higher level louder electrical output so you can feed it directly into a music system without needing any further electronic manipulation. We also build ceramic bearings i e bearings with ceramic races but they are not as common because they are less durable. Most of the time you only need to replace the needle.
The ceramic cartridges on crosley turntables track at about 3 times the weight of a decent quality magnetic cartridge which can. Vintage ceramic cartridges can be identified by how stiffly the needle is held. My understanding is that ceramic needles are very bad for vinyl but specifics are hard to come by. Titanium nitride is an extremely hard ceramic material that is applied to the surface of a metal object through a process called physical vapor deposition.
A moving magnet cartridge has a much softer lower level output so you need to amplify its signal first before it goes into the rest of the system. So playing a 78rpm tip on an lp record will sound pretty bad and playing an lp tip in a 78rpm wide groove record will be about like digging a trench at the bottom of the v shaped record groove. January 10 2008 source. Crosley turntables use ceramic cartridges.