The Agnew Analog Reference Instrument Type 192 is a minimalist, industrial-grade stylus heater supply unit, designed and built to last forever.
It is a current-regulated design, set at the factory for 550 mA, in an ultra-ruggedized configuration, for maximum reliability in constant-duty environments, when downtime is not an option.
The Westrex 2B is a motional feedback cutter head, introduced in 1952 by the Western Electric Export Company. It followed hot on the heels of the Westrex 2A, dating from 1947, which was itself a lateral implementation of the principles first described by Wiebusch, Vieth and Yenzer in 1938, with a couple of relevant patents issued by 1939, for a vertical cutter head employing motional feedback.
Our popular Agnew Analog Reference Instrument Type 1501 Stylus shank adapter was intended to make it possible to use the Neumann-style taper shank stylus (Transco 320, Adamant NSH-2, etc) with vintage mono heads such as the Presto 1-C and 1-D, which need a long shank stylus.
Up to now, customers would just install the adapter and leave it there, only occasionally replacing the stylus. One customer, however, wanted to be able to leave the stylii aligned in the adapter, and change them out without needing to realign.
We recently had the pleasure of having Symatic over, from Bristol, UK, for a week of training on how to cut (and how not to cut) records.
Symatic runs Cut & Paste Records, a record label attracting some serious attention among skratchers, with high quality releases of skipless skratch samples, lock-groove tones, beats, and relevant music.
Requests for a stylus tool kept on coming in, so we decided to design and manufacture them! We call it the Agnew Analog Reference Instruments Type 6019 and it is now available for sale.
There is a long history of use of precious stones as industrial materials, from precision bearings to cutting tools, lapping compounds to grinding tools and several other specialised applications.
The recording of phonograph records is essentially a machining operation, performed by means of a machine tool called a disk recording lathe. A special cutting tool is used to cut a continuous spiral groove on the surface of a blank disk. This tool is called a disk recording stylus, or simply cutting stylus.
The big difference to other forms of machining is that there is sonic information stored as modulation of the cut groove, which can be reproduced on another special machine, often called turntable or record player, or disk reproduction system.
Stereophonic cutter heads developed by Neumann are designed to accept a cutting stylus with a conical shank, resembling a micro-miniature version of a Morse Taper, a type of fitting frequently encountered in machine tools, especially metalworking lathes. Vinylium and FloKaSon cutter heads also adopted the same fitting for the sake of compatibility. But most other cutter heads, especially all those predating the stereophonic era, used long, thin cylindrical shanks, often with a flat machined on one side, to allow a set-screw to align the stylus and secure it in place.
