the music here is in homophonic style
did you know that sony made phono cartridges?
yeah me neither but at one point they did this is probably from the 1970s or maybe very early 1980s
you can't find much information about it except that it exists and you still can get replacement
needles for it it's the sony vx-23p ceramic phono cartridge made by sony corporation in tokyo japan
and i got this from an ebay seller in israel so i don't know if this was even sold
in the U.S. it has english and french in it so maybe it was sold in canada i don't know
and you may think this was just a replacement part for sony turntables which would have come
with this cartridge originally but if we open it up this definitely looks like retail packaging
because i don't think they would have put it in this kind of fancy
plexiglass case if it was just a replacement part i mean look at that they even screwed in
the screws into the case to hold it in place and again it says made in japan on the bottom there
and there's the little booklet that came with it
it has installation instructions
and there's the replacement stylus nd-127p you can still get aftermarket equivalents of
that and it is a diamond stylus it says it will last for 600 or more hours of use there are the
specifications and it says 780 there i don't know could that be a date code for 1978 or maybe 1980
and i know these days ceramic phono cartridges have a reputation for poor
sound quality and heavy tracking and possibly damaging your records because of these things
these infamous chuo denshi knockoff chinese-made phono cartridges which you can get for like two
bucks each so when people think of ceramic phono cartridges these days this is what they think of
these cheap crosley type cartridges but with sony's manufacturing and engineering expertise
maybe they were able to do a much better job of making a ceramic phono cartridge than
these things so that's why i'm curious to try this out
specifications it is a ceramic type cartridge as already explained frequency response is not
as good as most magnetic cartridges which pretty much all claim a 20 to 20,000 hertz
frequency range although they never give a tolerance so it's almost a meaningless figure
if you don't know how much it varies from a flat response but this one claims 30 to 16,000 hertz
channel separation is better than 15 dB which is on the low side compared to
magnetic cartridges channel bounce is within 2 dB typical for an entry level cartridge
now here's the strange part output voltage 3 millivolts most ceramic cartridges have
an output level of somewhere between 200 and 500 millivolts well this one is only three millivolts
which is typical for a magnetic cartridge so it's possible they designed this to be compatible
with a magnetic phono input i'll have to see which type of input it works better with
and the like here lord impedance yeah that this must have been designed by
sir lord impedance but it's 500 kilo ohms to 2 meg ohms which is typical
for a ceramic cartridge they require much higher impedance than magnetic cartridges
compliance i don't know if that's good or bad but it's 2.5 times 10 to the minus 6 centimeters per
dyn whatever that means and it has a 0.7 mil diamond conical stylus very typical
stylus force 3 to 4.5 grams a little bit heavier than typical magnetic cartridges but not by
much for example the aforementioned at3600l tracks at 3.5 grams which is within this range
otherwise installation instructions are typical just as to connect the
wires according to the colors and showing how to install the stylus
and the dimensions and then the same thing in french and spanish
and i just realized it doesn't come with a stylus protector which is unfortunate
so i'll take off that stylus so i don't damage it when i'm installing it
there's a close-up look at the stylus and you can still get replacements for this today
unfortunately there is only a standard conical stylus available for this cartridge you cannot get
an elliptical stylus for it although you can get a three mil stylus for playing 78s
and when i remove the cartridge from this holder i notice it says AUE that was a company that made
ceramic cartridges for companies like panasonic so i'm pretty sure they made this cartridge for sony
so sony didn't actually make this it was made by AUE
and you can definitely see it's a ceramic cartridge because it has this
rubber yoke which the stylus fits into and as the groove vibrates the stylus
it moves this yoke back and forth and up and down and that bends the ceramic rod inside here
which generates electricity and that's how these cartridges work as opposed to magnetic
cartridges where it's moving in an armature and a coil of wire to generate the audio signal
and i noticed they have what appears to be weights in here to make it heavier
so this is the one kind of cheap looking part of it but when you have this mounted in a
headshell you're not going to see the top of it so that's no big deal
so i'm going to mount this in this technic style headshell and we'll try it out
there it is mounted and aligned using one of these handy technics overhang gauges all you have to do
is insert the head shell into it and then line up the cartridge until the stylus tip
lines up vertically with the tip of this base here and aligns side to side with the
center of that base there's a little arrow there which you probably are not able to see
and the original mounting hardware that sony provided was of no use because they provided bolts
but no nuts so there was nothing for these to mount into so i needed to dig into my three bags
of phono cartridge mounting hardware and i was able to find these bolts and nuts
and washers to get it mounted and then i plugged in the wires which thankfully was
straightforward you just match up the colors according to sony's manual here
and with the help of some needlenose pliers i was able to get those installed
so this is ready to go on the turntable and the turntable i'll be using it on is my at-lp120
which i did a pre-ampectomy on years ago i removed the built-in pre-amp
so these wires coming out of it are coming directly from the phono cartridge
the left and right outputs and the ground wire which i added
and i'll be using it with this mixer which has both
magnetic and ceramic phono inputs so i can use whichever one sounds better first i'll try
the ceramic input and if that doesn't provide sufficient output i'll try the magnetic input
i have the tracking force set to 3.75 grams which
is right in the middle of sony's recommended range of 3 to 4.5 grams
uh i guess i won't be using my at-lp120 after all because
this is definitely not what 33 and a third rpm looks like it
doesn't matter what speed i set it to the motor just revs up to maximum speed
i mean that's even way faster than 78 and there's no braking when i tell it to stop the motor
it was working fine the last time i used it although admittedly that was probably a year
or two ago and it doesn't matter if i move this around or turn on or off quartz lock
the only thing that does work is telling it to reverse the motor
you can see it slows down and stops then it goes in the opposite direction
but clearly the speed regulation of this turntable has completely failed
so here's the understudy my 1977 technics by panasonic sl-1900 direct drive turntable
and there's no way this cartridge has an output of only three millivolts because
the ceramic phono input of this mixer is rated for around 200 millivolts and if i turn it up it has
no problem going into the red so it's definitely putting out at least 200 millivolts so yes you
do need to use this cartridge with a ceramic phono input it will not work with a magnetic phono input
ceramic phono cartridges used to be so popular that up until the early 1990s
if you saw a phono input on a stereo system or entry level amplifier it was usually for a
ceramic cartridge not magnetic but these days they have virtually disappeared for modern equipment
the only audio component i know of that you can buy new today that has a ceramic phono input
is the andover spinbase an all-in-one amplifier and speaker system designed to go under your
turntable it has a switch on the back to select either line in or ceramic cartridge
now finally let's hear some samples of what this sony vx-23p ceramic phono cartridge sounds like
oh
when the words come out of my mouth can you tell that the words were never really
i like being pleasantly surprised and i definitely have been surprised by this little
sony phono cartridge it's by no means the best sounding phono cartridge i've ever heard
but it's definitely the best sounding ceramic phono cartridge
i've ever heard and it's sad to think that nothing like this is ever going to be made again
this is a case where perception becomes reality people perceive ceramic phono cartridges to be
of inferior quality so there's no demand for higher quality ones to be made
that's the same situation that cassette tapes are in the general public perceives them to be
an inferior format even though they're capable of very high fidelity so nobody's going to spend
the development cost to produce new higher quality cassette decks and cassette tapes
the demand for them is just not there to justify it
but for those of us who are odd enough to enjoy these underdog formats and obsolete technologies
i'm glad i've been able to give a listen to this sony vx-23p ceramic phono cartridge made by AUE
in fact i think i'm going to keep it on this technics turntable and continue
listening to it at least it'll distract me from the fact that my at-lp120
turntable just died on me it is 12 years old but both this technics turntable and this
sony phono cartridge are over 40 years old and they're still going strong so that's no excuse
and this macbook pro that i'm using to edit and upload this video is now 14 years old