The speed change function has nothin to do with how the pickup arm
tracks..and yes it probably is too heavy and the stylus is probably
too stiff for some modern records. Those models (IIRC) continued the
use of the same arm that had been designed in the late 50's. It uses a
crude torsion finger spring for setting the tracking weight. Two
problems he First, the spring doesn't have the "resolution" to
maintain a constant pressure. So as a record warps slightly upwards,
pressure increases -a lot-. Second, this sort of setup moves the
arm's fulcrum all to one side of the vertical shaft that supports the
arm and forms it's pivot point. This causes much more friction and
requires the use of a less compliant cart/stylus to keep the stylus
from hopping the grooves.

Whenever I encountered this sort of arm in either AMI or the few R-O's
that I rebuilt, I always drilled out a hole in the rear of the arm and
added an adjustable counterweight and eliminated that stupid spring.
Note: This usually requires cutting away a small section of the dress
cover to make space for the counterweight. But it is well worth it in
that you can now use a decent cart (I use a Pickering V-15 series) and
add a preamp. Much improved sound and way less record wear. I'll
never understand why these companies used this sort of junky, crude
setup when a counterweight would have cost very little more and
initial setup could have been done with simple distance measurement
instead of trial and error bending of that spring.

Rob




On Apr 23, 9:29*pm, TheOtherBrit TheOtherBrit.
wrote:
I have a '63 Rock-ola Rhapsody that we just recently got up and running
again. *We disabled the lever spring that decides whether your record is
45 RPM or 33 RPM based on the middle hole size so I could add some of my
modern 7" records and not worry about it changing the speed.

On the first try, the arm dropped and peeled curls of vinyl as the
record turned. *It was colored vinyl, but I'm friends with the label
owner and he said it shouldn't be any softer than black vinyl. *I have
records from the 80's that play with no problems. *

Did manufacturers start making vinyl cheaper in the 90s? *Is there some
way to bypass this or is this arm just too heavy for anything modern?

--
TheOtherBrit