Back to Part 6

Tracking force

In order to keep the stylus tip in the groove of the record, it must have some force pushing down on it. This force must be enough to keep the stylus in the groove. However, if it is too large, then both the vinyl and the stylus will wear more quickly. Thus a balance must be found between “too much” and “not enough”.

As can be seen in Figure 1, the typical tracking force of phonograph players has changed considerably since the days of gramophones playing shellac discs, with values under 10 g being standard since the introduction of vinyl microgroove records in 1948. The original recommended tracking force of the Beogram 4002 was 1 g, however, this has been increased to 1.3 g for the Beogram 4000c in order to help track more recent recordings with higher modulation velocities and displacements.

Effective Tip Mass

The stylus’s job is to track all of the vibrations encoded in the groove. It stays in that groove as a result of the adjustable tracking force holding it down, so the moving parts should be as light as possible in order to ensure that they can move quickly. The total apparent mass of the parts that are being moved as a result of the groove modulation is called the effective tip mass. Intuitively, this can be thought of as giving an impression of the amount of inertia in the stylus.

It is important to not confuse the tracking force and the effective tip mass, since these are very different things. Imagine a heavy object like a 1500 kg car, for example, lifted off the ground using a crane, and then slowly lowered onto a scale until it reads 1 kg. The “weight” of the car resting on the scale is equivalent to 1 kg. However, if you try to push the car sideways, you will obviously find that it is more difficult to move than a 1 kg mass, since you are trying to overcome the inertia of all 1500 kg, not the 1 kg that the scale “sees”. In this analogy, the reading on the scale is equivalent to the Tracking Force, and the mass that you’re trying to move is the Effective Tip Mass. Of course, in the case of a phonograph stylus, the opposite relationship is desirable; you want a tracking force high enough to keep the stylus in the groove, and an effective tip mass as close to 0 as possible, so that it is easy for the groove to move it.

Compliance

Imagine an audio signal that is on the left channel only. In this case, the variation is only on one of the two groove walls, causing the stylus tip to ride up and down on those bumps. If the modulation velocity is high, and the effective tip mass is too large, then the stylus can lift off the wall of the groove just like a car leaving the surface of a road on the trailing side of a bump. In order to keep the car’s wheels on the road, springs are used to push them back down before the rest of the car starts to fall. The same is true for the stylus tip. It’s being pushed back down into the groove by the cantilever that provides the spring. The amount of “springiness” is called the compliance of the stylus suspension. (Compliance is the opposite of spring stiffness: the more compliant a spring is, the easier it is to compress, and the less it pushes back.)

Like many other stylus parameters, the compliance is balanced with other aspects of the system. In this case it is balanced with the effective mass of the tonearm (which includes the tracking force(1), resulting in a resonant frequency. If that frequency is too high, then it can be audible as a tone that is “singing along” with the music. If it’s too low, then in a worst-case situation, the stylus can jump out of the record groove.

If a turntable is very poorly adjusted, then a high tracking force and a high stylus compliance (therefore, a “soft” spring) results in the entire assembly sinking down onto the record surface. However, a high compliance is necessary for low-frequency reproduction, therefore the maximum tracking force is, in part, set by the compliance of the stylus.

If you are comparing the specifications of different cartridges, it may be of interest to note that compliance is often expressed in one of five different units, depending on the source of the information:

• “Compliance Unit” or “cu”
• mm/N
  millimetres of deflection per Newton of force
• µm/mN
  micrometres of deflection per thousandth of a Newton of force
• x 10^-6 cm/dyn
  hundredths of a micrometre of deflection per dyne of force
• x 10^-6 cm / 10^-5 N
  hundredths of a micrometre of deflection per hundred-thousandth of a Newton of force

Since

mm/N = 1000 µm / 1000 mN

and

1 dyne = 0.00001 Newton

Then this means that all five of these expressions are identical, so, they can be interchanged freely. In other words:

20 CU

= 20 mm / N

= 20 µm / mN

= 20 x 10^-6 cm / dyn

= 20 x 10^-6 cm / 10^-5 N

Footnotes

1. On the Mechanics of Tonearms, Dick Pierce