New needle

After getting back from London yesterday, I tried playing a disc (reference 3) of Beethoven's Emperor Concerto. Very poor. Tried blowing on the needle, tried another disc (reference 4) of the same work. Still not much good. Neither disc looked very worn and there were no scratches to be seen.

So today, after a bit of fiddling about, I detached the needle from the arm of the (low end Pro-Ject) turntable and took it down to Sevenoaks, from whom I purchased my current set-up back in 2011, as briefly noticed at reference 2. No I couldn't have exactly the same one, but I could have a better one from ortofon, a Stylus 10 for £55. Plus the advice to put the old one back in, then take it out and put it back a few times, before moving onto the new one. Quite easy to damage the cantilever if you grab hold of the thing in the wrong way.

Now installed and it does sound a lot better, hopefully not just because I have thrown some money at it. The magic has come back.

I had thought that I had bought a replacement needle before, but I can find no trace of that. No blog entry, no receipt - although I did turn up the original receipt from 2011. Not even anything, apart from the new receipt, turned up by gmail search. Nor does having changed the needle today triggered any memory of having done it previously. The fitting of the needle to the cartridge is all new. So maybe there was no replacement, and the old needle is well over ten years old.

Kit not much used since we started going to more live concerts - and certainly not for this sort of thing, right off-piste for me.

PS 1: I have learned that Sevonoaks destroy all their customer records after 7 years in order to meet or to simplify meeting data protection requirements. A downside of this being that when you phone them up, some years after your fine purchase, possibly from some long way away, they have no idea what you are talking about and you have to spell it all out for them. Not a problem in the present case.

PS 2: I associate to the wind-up gramophone of my childhood, with a a huge horn and a substantial piece of oak-veneered furniture, matching the case of the gramophone itself, in which to keep one's collection of 78s. In those days cheapskates used steel needles, while real cognoscenti used thorns. Didn't last as long, but gave a better tone and did less damage to the discs.

PS 3: search failed to turn up the gramophone that I remember. The one above gives the idea, although the cabinet work is not of the same quality that I remember and the horn is a little too big.

[Mediaeval Home House | Lucy Boston | Music room | Hemingford Grey]

This one is even further away, but included here because during some part of the Second World War, my father, then an army dentist, used the gramophone that I knew to put on gramophone concerts in this very room for the benefit of servicemen in the area. He had been born in the The Thorpe (a very old lane) of Hemingford Grey, now mostly a housing estate. The son of a nurseryman who specialised in fruit and who did, as I recall, time as a tenor in the adult part of the choir of King's College. 

From where I associate to a fragment involving my father's oldest sister - he had a lot of them - driving a cart load of cherries to Cambridge market, down what is now the very busy A1307, then little more than a lane. For the music room, see reference 6.

PS 4: Friday morning: advertisements for Sevenoaks are popping in the New York Times this morning. Doesn't take long - but still after this particular horse has bolted.

References 

Reference 1: https://ortofon.com/. A Danish company.

Reference 2: https://pumpkinstrokemarrow.blogspot.com/2011/10/st-lukes.html.

Reference 3: The five piano concertos - Beethoven, Brendel, Haitink, Phillips - 1977. 99p from Oxfam, possibly the shop in Tavistock, which spent some years disposing of the collection of a serious collector. I did well out of it. Would have done even better had I been into opera.

Reference 4: The five piano concertos - Beethoven, Ashkenazy, Solti, Decca - 1973. Provenance uncertain, probably family.

Reference 5: https://www.sevenoakssoundandvision.co.uk/. Upper High Street in Epsom.

Reference 6: https://www.greenknowe.co.uk/the-house/.

Search keys: hifi, hi-fi, gramophone, turntable, sevenoaks, needle.