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Welcome Licorice Pizza (LP) lovers! Setup guides and Vinyl FAQ.

RE: 78 rpm stylus for 33 rpm records? Can it hurt?

You are asking about the included angle of the tip? Typically this should be "no more than" 60° but is normally 55° for "modern" tips. The tolerance for the groove angle is actually 90±5°in the IEC 1987 standard. The 1981 DIN standard actually has a finer tolerance of ±0.7°.
I don't know what the included angle is for a 78rpm tip and it might be larger than for a microgroove tip. If you look at the collector pages, there are lots of discussions around optimum stylus dimensions. It is all on a record by record basis and you can't rely on label or era.
For a stereo record, the maximum groove width is 30um and a mono record is 51um and the stylus bearing radius is chosen so that the contact point is about 60% of the way down the groove away from the shoulders.
My point to the OP (who curiously hasn't responded to anyone suggesting he just wanted moral support encouraging him to conduct his experiment in futility.... which he didn't get!) is that the tip is intended for Monophonic replay and the manufacturer is very careful to NOT provide a channel separation specification which implies that there is either NO vertical compliance or "very little" vertical movement. Either way, as the compliance of the 78rpm stylus is necessarily low (laterally) to remain in contact with a groove moving at a considerable speed, the OP is running a significant risk of damaging his records to say nothing of the erasure of the HF undulations he will be doing in a very short space of time.

Regards Anthony

"Beauty is Truth, Truth Beauty.." Keats


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