Rando McDando Needles & Carts

You know how there’s always that cool kid who wants to be different and stand out, or go their own way? Well, yeah, this occasionally happens in Turntable-Land when a company thinks to itself: ‘I’ll just go right ahead and come up with a whole different way of doing a thing that everybody else has been doing this other way and that works fine and has worked fine for decades, but I am going to be different, well, just coz I can.’

Little did they suspect (or care) that years down the track some end-user might want to replace this thing and that this ‘fancy, fandangled, proprietary system’ might make those people’s lives all that more difficult. And so, in the spirit of alleviating your pain—should you be the one to have found yourself in this invidious position—we bring you ‘A Document to Needlessness' —for your erudition and pleasure.

Check here for terminology should the following words be gobbledigook to you.

The Underscrew

Yes, sometimes it looks like you can’t get the cartridge off your headshell, but the twats have screwed the standard ‘half-inch-mount’ cart to the UNDERSIDE of the headshell. Not a disaster and replaceable, but a right pain in the a** to get to. Fiddly as…

This setup is unusual, but the cartridge may screw into the headshell from underneath. If it does it can be replaced.

Gently lift the tone arm and see how the cartridge is attached to the underside of the headshell.

If there are two screws, they can be undone and the cart removed. If it doesn't come off, then you are locked into that cartridge and there would be no point removing those wires (which you would have to do if you got a new cart).

If the cart doesn unscrew, then it is the standard half-inch-mount cartridge; be very careful at this stage not to tear out the 4 wires, they do come off the back of the cart, but they are crimped on and so you would usually use a small set of needle nosed pliers, grasping the metal part at the end of the wire, and firmly but gently pull them off the pins on the back of the cart.

On this headshell, there is also a screw on the back right hand side of the headshell, and it’s useful to undo this and see what happens? Does the headshell come off? The only reason to remove the headshell would be to make it easier to get the cart off, if it does unscrew.