Old deck wiring question?

[johnB]

I'm trying to get an old early 60s Murphy BSR record player working.

The cartridge is a BSR XIM which has two pins.....the arm cabling has red, black, green and white....which do I connect to the two pins on the cart please and what do I do with the other two?

Cheers
John

[struth]

Think it is a mono cartridge John. You would need a stereo cart really with 4 pins

[shane]

The arm will be wired for stereo but two of the wires will be redundant in a mono player. My guess is that you should use the red and black, but it won't do any harm if you get it wrong. You'll either get silence or a bit of a hum. Chances are that the other two wires will be taken to a socket for an optional extension amp for the other channel. Quite a lot of 60s record players offered that facility.

Dont forget that a mono cartridge (almost certainly crystal or ceramic) will probably have no vertical compliance and will damage any stereo record you put on it.

[johnB]

Thanks Grant, thanks Shane.

I'm only fettling with it for our neighbour who wants to listen to Willie Nelson on it.

[DSJR]

Some of the later flip-under mono BSR cartridges allowed enough vertical stylus movement to be classed as 'stereo compatible' models, but I think it was the X5 series' onwards that were fully this way (long-ago memory so need to check).

You know, I have a few ceramic cartridges from the late 60's - 9TA-HC, KS41C/3559. Acos GP-96 and GP104 and into a 1.5M load, they sound incredibly vibrant (the GP96 is soft though as I remember my Hacker record player with this cartridge being), although surface roar is just that and it's this latter that really dates them! The 104 suffers a hardened once flexible coupling sadly.

[Barry]

Ceramic/crystal cartridges require different equalisation. The RIAA equalisation provided by the phono input is only applicable to electrodynamic cartridges (either moving coil or fixed coil designs).