I think you can safely play a stylus -any stylus- for at least 1000 hours assuming two things: you keep it clean by dusting off every side with at least a brush and that every few days at least you use a liquid or gel type cleaner, assuming the manufacturer recommends it. Today’s (more advanced) styli wear by softening the ridges or edges. In other words, the severe stylus profiles get rounded. Thus worn styli do not ruin records. So while the sound may somewhat soften and deteriorate (as a result of stylus wear) I don’t believe record wear or ruined records result.” Patented by Namiki of Japan in 1983, the MicroRidge is a very complex shape that has been made possible only by using laser-cutting techniques. The MicroRidge stylus almost exactly duplicates the shape of the cutting stylus that produces the original master disc at the vinyl pressing plant. Contrary to cats squirrel, I consider that an ML is no overkill for your turntable and tonearm, and that you'd be able to hear the difference if compared to a plain elliptical (bonded or nude). Even if you weren't able to extract the most out of the ML (which I think you will), it will be noticeably better than a VMN95EN especially on the inner grooves of challenging albums. The VMN95EN is very good on its own, but it is easy to spot it as worse on a blind test against an ML (at least for me) when given a challenging song. Designed to mimic as close as possible a record cutting head/cutting lathe for highest fidelity & lifespan usually fitted to a precision boron , sapphire , ruby or zirconium ultra light & rigid cantilever

SAS -Natural single-crystal, nude-mounted octahedral diamond stylus tip ,The stylus tip is of optimum height and a uniformly ultra-precision finish. The Super Analogue Stylus has a curvature with a smaller radius that was impossible with the Micro Ridge Stylus. As thin as a razor blade and machined with ultra precision, the stylus tip ensures unsurpassed fidelity.Polished finish that virtually preserves your record's grooves.World-class polishing technique is used on each stylus. This is designed to preserve the details of the record groove structure for a very long time — virtually for the life of the vinyl. The AT-VM95SH, features a Nude Shibata stylus, one of the most acclaimed stylus format by high end audiophiles. The Shibata stylus produces mid and bass sounds strong and rich in addition to offer a frequency response up to 25,000 Hz. It is evident that if this transcription falters, there is no downstream knob to correct for it. I applaud Audio-Technica for recognizing this fact and offers a real solution amenable to any budget. Although the images above seem exaggerated, this is exactly how the signal is generated from vinyl and is a focus of this review.The two most common stylus shapes are spherical styli (also called conical) and elliptical styli (also referred to as bi-radial). Both types have positive and negative attributes… Spherical stylus Provides a beautiful mid-high range Shibata-signature sound and strong mid-range volume. No use of nuts A permalloy centre shield plate enables the effective separation of left and right channels, suppressing electrical crosstalk to below 40dB. This is similar to the actual crosstalk value found in the grooves of the record itself. 700 Series Older Mono records have a U type Groove Mono/78RPM 3.0mil is the accepted norm& Steel Needles for gramophone records A stylus is the incredibly fine part that actually sits in the grooves of your record as it spins, and starts the process of bringing your music to life. Because the grooves on a record are VERY narrow, the design of your stylus makes a huge difference in how much information it can get out of those grooves. And the more information, the more “real” your music will sound when it comes out of your speakers. Getting in shape

While there are various other important parameters, these are the two main differentiators among the various stylus shapes. The details of these two aspects and more can be read below in the respective Stylus Shape sections. Bonded versus NudeThe cross-section of a Shibata stylus is basically an Elliptical shape with extra slivers shaved off on one end to create a hybrid asymmetrical shape, as illustrated below.

There are a couple of exotic shapes intended for the real connoisseurs that I will include for completeness but that, so far, I have no personal experience with and will not discuss for now. What Ortofon also mentions is that another consideration to be made is that any diamond stylus will begin to exhibit physical changes after approximately 1,000 hours. This can lead to audible results. X 1.0 mil elliptical diamond - Edison Diamond & very old/worn discs, raw aluminium, RCA home recordings., also Pathé vertical discs Para-toroidal coils improve generating efficiency and offers superb linearity, since leakage of magnetic flux in this continuous and unitised magnetic circuit is low. Permeability of the cores is also optimised through the use of laminated cores.

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The MicroRidge cross-section is very complex but probably best described as a mini Philips screwdriver shape, as illustrated below. Because it sits quite wide in the groove, a spherical stylus is cheap to make and really easy to align (that is, get it sitting straight in the groove so that it reads both sides evenly – learn more about alignment here ), you’ll commonly see them on DJ turntables and entry-level hi-fi turntables. The downside is that the broader tip means it can’t get into the groove as well, so a spherical stylus can leave out some of the finer details that make your music sound exciting.