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Good question...

Conical and elliptical styli were often specified in mils, which are thousandths of an inch.

1-mil = 25.4-microns, which is the same as 25.4-um. A micron is a millionth of a meter.

Therefore, a conical tip measuring 0.7-mil had a radius of 17.8-microns. The Denon DL-103 and DL-103R had a conical tip specified at 16.5-um, which would be 0.65-mil.

An elliptical stylus with radial dimensions of 0.3 x 0.7-mil would measure in microns at 7.6 x 17.8-um. A 0.2 x 0.7-mil hyper-elliptical would measure 5.1 x 17.8-um.

Consequently, a 7.6 x 40-um line contact stylus would be equivalent to a 0.3 x 1.6-mil elliptical tip and a 7 x 30-um line contact would be equivalent to a 0.28 x 1.2-mil elliptical.

I have no doubt that Anthony is correct about micro-ridge or micro-line styli having radial dimensions of 1 and 2-microns. This will allow them to trace the groove more accurately, especially the higher frequency inner grooves.

In terms of practical tracking ability, most of us feel that line contact styli will trace the groove more accurately than a conical stylus. In fact, I thought the Denon DL-103 and DL-103R were significantly inferior to modern cartridges because of their conical tips, but when I finally decided to buy one I discovered they didn't produce any inner groove distortion to speak of when mounted in my Sota Millennia / SME V. That actually surprised me very much. Moreover, when I measured harmonic distortion on 15-kHz and 20-kHz test tones, they had slightly lower distortion than both my Audio Technica OC9ML/II and my Shure V-15VxMR. This also surprised me very much.

I still believe that line-contact styli are superior to conical styli, but there is no question that Denon cartridges with conical tips sound very good in many respects. Moreover, I wasn't expecting them to sound as good as they do especially on inner grooves.

Best regards,
John Elison


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