When the RIAA (Record Industry Association of America) released “Bulletin E3 “on October 16, 1963, little did they know they had started a chain-reaction that would result in a design icon.
It stated: ‘The reproducing stylus motion shall be tangent to, or lie in a plane which passes through the record center, and which is inclined at a nominal angle of 15 degrees, clockwise, to a normal (sic) to the record at the stylus tip, as viewed from the record center.’
They believed the introduction of this standard would improve sound quality since, up to that point, the angle used to cut stereo records varied among manufacturers. If the cutting angle was different to the angle of your record player needle, it would create distortion. So now the record manufacturers all began to cut at an angle of 15 degrees and this naturally forced a change in needle design.
Shure is a Chicago institution. It was founded in 1925 by Sydney Shure as a one man radio parts company and remains privately owned today. Although famous for its ubiquitous microphones, developing phonograph cartridges was what made Shure blow-up. “We were making upwards of 25 or 20 thousand cartridges per day - entire manufacturing lines of people with microscopes just assembling phonograph needles and cartridges and diamonds”, says Bill Oakley, Global Product Manager for Shure.
Their 1948 development of the first cartridge capable of playing both long playing and 78rpm records made it the biggest cartridge manufacturer in the US.
So, when Shure’s engineers realised they couldn’t adapt their current line to the new 15-degree angle, they were not about to be fazed.
What they came up with was the M44-7. It was actually designed for the high-end audiophile market, belying the modern perception, held by some, of it being a sonically unsubtle cartridge designed to hold the groove at all costs.
Bill paints a fairly low-tech picture which, you sense, does not quite do justice to the complexities involved: “As far as “technology” goes, back in the analogue days, there wasn’t a whole lot you could do, because it was just a transducer, but you could mix and match, you know? How many coil turns do I have around the magnet? How much spring wire do I use to get this kind of vertical compliance? How long do I make this?
“So you’re just kind of playing with the pieces and trial and erroring it and then testing it, until you find what it is that kind of works. The development was done by the phono guys and it’s the same technology that goes into a microphone so it’s just physics basically.”
To achieve the high quality audio, head engineer Bob Kita and his team focussed on achieving good vertical compliance - the ability of the diamond stylus to move up and down freely in the groove of the record because, Bill says: “if that is not done well, you lose information or you have poor audio quality that the diamond is trying the read out of the valleys and peaks of the grooved record.”
Shure was extremely proud of the creation, which reduced harmonic distortion with little or no cross-talk between the channels. Bill says: “It had such great sound quality. It was the full spectrum of 20 to 20,000 Hz. It had good resistance, but a really really all around good sounding audiophile cartridge.”
Shure’s press release at the time talked of a “totally efficient retractile stylus that momentarily retracts whenever excessive forces are applied to the tone arm”. It is this feature of the cartridge - the suspension system - that would seal its fortunes and why it would make the perfect partner to the jukebox.