MANUFACTURERS’ COMMENTS

WallyTools

Thank you Michael Fremer and Stereophile for the kind attention paid to WallyTools and, more importantly, to proper analog setup!

We continue to be surprised at how much more information and musical realism a line-contact stylus can extract from the grooves when it is perfectly aligned for all three angular relationships with the groove walls: rake, azimuth, and zenith.

Unfortunately, most of the technical studies on the mechanical relationship between the stylus and groove that have been done and submitted for peer review were from the 1970s or earlier, and few of them were conducted with styli that have the fine and long groove-contact surface features found on today’s high-end cartridges. Ideal alignment targets for a stylus haven’t changed over the decades, but our styli have become much more sensitive to getting it right, while the rest of the audio equipment chain has improved to better offer the rewards proper cartridge alignment offers.

Compared to conical or elliptical styli, fine-line contact styli behave very differently when tracing the groove walls if not aligned optimally. (The reference is a cutterhead that aims for 90° to record on azimuth, colinear to the record radius on zenith, and 91°–93° on rake angle.) A poorly aligned fine-line contact stylus will modulate vertically in a horizontally modulated groove and vice