Quote Originally Posted by E-Stat
That and the stupid brushes found on virtually all the upper end products.
I have to take issue with you on this one. When I started at Pickering in '76, I was astounded at the nationwide hatred on the parts of all dealer salespeople regarding the brushes on either Pickering or Stanton cartrdiges. I'd never experienced any difficulties using them myself (add an extra gram to the tracking and anti-skating force settings, and everything worked just fine), but just about everyone everywhere thought they "interfered with tracking," and all sorts of horrible things.

I spoke with the company's engineers and said that, either we get rid of the brush, or, if it actually is beneficial (other than merely being unique), then we have to inform people about that. I was truly astounded aby the preponderance of the engineering evidence as to the benefits of using these brushes. Most significant, was the tonearm damping effect, allowing the cartridges to play warped records they wouldn't play without the brush. Eventually, a pamphlet called, "The Do's and Don't's of the Dustamatic/Longhair Brush" was produced.

The bristles on the brushes were deliberately too wide to go down into the record's groove, and attracted the dust by static electricity caused by the rubbing action on the record's surface. Due to the electrical nature of the cartridges themselves, this static was discharged throghout the tonemarm and to ground. As I said already, the brushes aided enormously in the playing of warped records, and they actually provided measurable low frequency damping. The problem was that neither company ever promoted this in their advertising, and just sat idly by as everyone else ridiculed the brush.

Discwasher briefly manufactured a "stabilizer" to attach to a tonearm/cartridge which, in my conversations with the folks there, readily acknowledged that Pickering/Stanton "were onto something" with the brushes. The ultimate approval actually came in the guise of a knockoff, and that was the "dynamic stablizer" incorporated on the Shure V/15V. Everything the dynamic stablizer claimed to do (which it actually did) was no different than that which the Dustamatic/Longhair brushes did. Shure just (and smartly, I might add) used all sorts of technobabble to explain how it worked. It did, but no better than the Pickering/Stanton brushes.

To this day I use the brush when playing my Stanton Collector's Series CS-100 cartridge. I set the tracking force at 2 1/4 grams, and the anti-skate at the same. The net tracking is 1 1/4 grams as the brush is self-supporting, and I've never experienced any difficulties using it.