Elliptical & Spherical stylus. All about weight distribution

0:00 I'm going to be looking at two from a company called Autofon

Alright folks, now this particular video is all about just sorting out a couple of small points in relation to elliptical and spherical stylite. Now I'm going to be looking at two from a company called Autofon. What I'll do, I'll put a clickable link in the description as well. Looking at these two here, that one there is known as the Nightclub Mark II, is elliptical. Now first of all, if we sort of imagined that we had a fantastic microscope and we were able to look at the tiny small needle, we'd see that sort of shape for the elliptical and that sort of shape for the spherical. Okay, now what I want you to do, I want you to imagine all of a sudden, I mean we're in the middle of summer now, but imagine it's the winter time and we've got above the ground, we've got a whole bunch of snow and we've got the ground there.

1:01 That very shortly

And then imagine, no, that's the wrong one first, that one there. Imagine this here is the spherical styline with three grams on it. And this one here is the elliptical with three grams. But I've made this one quite small and this one quite long. I will explain that very shortly. Now let's imagine we start to press those into the snow. But the spherical here has gone deeper into the snow than the elliptical. Now why is that? Now let me show you, and I'm going to draw this while I explain. Okay, spherical. Now what I'm going to do is, if I just come around the camera, hopefully you can see this, I'm going to draw something that let's say would resemble the groove in a record. So if we, can you see that?

2:25 What happens is that we've got the groove here again

Right, if we draw the groove down and it goes around like that. There you go. Now there's the groove, OK? Now what's actually happened is quite a bit of this end of the needle isn't touching the groove. So in other words, let's say the weight distribution is only hitting the sides. Whereas, if we look at the elliptical, if I put it there, that's it. What happens is that we've got the groove here again. Now what's happened is the elliptical styli, the needle, is hitting virtually all of the groove, therefore the weight distribution is greater. So in other words, what's basically happening is all of the weight is hitting more surface area, basically meaning that there's less weight on a smaller area.

The likes of Elliptical may, sort of in a sense, wear the records out a lot quicker, but you will get better sound. Now again, it's all about weight distribution. If you think about it logically, if you've got that groove tucked directly, well sorry, the needle, the stylus, tucked directly into the groove... Thank you for watching.

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