Pickering V-15/AME
Five grams of moving-magnet engineering that Pickering sold as a system, not a cartridge. The AME is the elliptical-stylus flagship of the V-15 line.
Overview
The V-15 is a very small cartridge. The whole thing weighs five grams, and Pickering built the V-15 family around that number. The company's own advertising made a point of the low mass and pitched the cartridge as a natural match for low-mass tonearm systems. Plenty of pickups from the same era were boat anchors that fought the arm's every move.
The V-15 was never a single product. Pickering sold it as a cartridge system, with several different stylus assemblies sharing one body. The appropriate assembly mounts in a "V" guard holder that slips easily in or out of the cartridge body, and the entire moving assembly is swapped out with it. Operation is by the moving-magnet principle, and the whole moving structure lives in the stylus assembly. One body, a handful of styli, each one tuned for a different job.
The AME sat at the top of that stack. Pickering's own advertising positioned the elliptical-stylus V-15AME-1 as the choice of the "technical sophisticate who demands the last word in tracking ability," and the spec sheet backs it up. The V-15AME offered 20-20,000 Hz response at under 2 percent distortion, with an elliptical diamond of 0.25/0.85 mils. Tracking is at the standard 15-degree angle. Stereo separation is stated at 35 dB at 1000 Hz, falling to 25 dB at 10,000 Hz.
That low tracking force is the whole point of the AME. Pickering's advertising from the period is explicit about who got which model. The V-15AC was for conventional record changers, where high output and heavier tracking forces are required. The V-15AT was for lighter tracking in high-quality automatic turntables. The even more compliant V-15AM was ideal for professional-type manual turntables. The AME, with its elliptical stylus, was the one for the buyer chasing maximum tracking ability. Advertising for the line ran across the audio press through the mid-1960s. Audio (January 1965, p.19) and HiFi-Stereo (March 1965, p.137) both carried the same "Natural Sound Begins with Pickering" pitch, with the elliptical-stylus AME-1 called out at the top of the copy.
The design is modular. Because the moving assembly is the stylus assembly, replacing a worn stylus means replacing the entire moving structure, not just a diamond on a cantilever. The consumable part and the precision part are the same part. Pickering also fitted the line with its exclusive Floating Stylus and patented replaceable V-Guard stylus assembly, which the company claimed protected both the record and the diamond during play.
The stylus options extended beyond the elliptical flagship. Lower-compliance conical styli were available for use in changers and manual players, all fitted with 0.7-mil diamonds. There was also a 3-mil assembly for playing large-groove 78-rpm discs. The same body could serve a changer, a manual table, or a stack of 78s depending on which assembly was clipped in. A V-15 body found today without its original stylus is not a broken cartridge. It is the front half of a modular design.
The fact sheet carries no production years, no original price, and no current market data, so none of those are given here. What the documentation does support is the engineering: a five-gram moving-magnet cartridge, a moving assembly that lives entirely in the stylus, 20-20,000 Hz response under 2 percent distortion, 35 dB separation at 1 kHz tapering to 25 dB at 10 kHz, a 0.25/0.85-mil elliptical diamond, standard 15-degree tracking, and tracking forces down to % gram.
For the collector, the appeal is the modularity and the elliptical flagship stylus more than any single number. The V-15/AME represents a moment when Pickering treated a phono cartridge as a configurable instrument — one body, many voices, each one matched to a specific kind of turntable and a specific kind of listener. The "technical sophisticate" copy is period puffery, but the engineering underneath it was real, and the five-gram body remains the clearest expression of what the V-15 line was trying to do.
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