Shure VN-15E

Name: Shure VN-15E
Brand: Shure

A $27 replacement stylus that, by Shure's own account, turned a good tracking cartridge into a great one.

Overview

The VN-15E is a stylus assembly, not a cartridge. Shure sold it as the upgrade path for owners of the V-15 Type II Super Trackability phono cartridge - the "Improved" stylus that, once snapped into an existing body, delivered the higher bass and mid-range trackability of the revised V-15 Type II without buying a whole new cartridge. Shure's advertising from the period is unusually direct about this. The company's own copy told V-15 Type II owners they could "modify your present V-15 Type II" simply by installing the improved VN15E stylus, and pointed buyers to the word "Shure" printed in red letters on the stylus grip as the way to tell the improved part from the old one.

The engineering claim behind it is specific. Shure's ad copy described the low register - tympani, tuba, contrabass, bassoon, bass drum - as the "backbone" of orchestral music, and noted that these passages, when cut at high velocities, were exactly what made cartridges misbehave. Even the V-15 Type II, which Shure billed as the world's highest-trackability cartridge, needed its tracking force raised to get through records with heavily modulated bass drum, organ pedal, or piano passages. The improved VN15E stylus was the fix. Shure claimed it let owners drop from 1¼ grams to 1 gram, or from 1 gram to ¾ gram, on records with high-velocity bass material, and that the majority of records could be tracked at ¾ gram with the improved part fitted. The pitch was record and stylus tip life: less force, less wear, same or better tracking.

Pricing in the period record is slightly inconsistent. Shure's own advertising listed the VN15E stylus at $27.00 net, with the complete V-15 Type II cartridge at $67.50. One later Shure advertisement in the same campaign quoted the stylus at $27.50. Either way, roughly forty percent of the cartridge's price bought the improved stylus alone, which made the upgrade sensible for anyone who already owned the body.

High Fidelity (May 1970, p.43) covered the V-15 revision under the headline "Shure Improves Its V-15 Cartridge" and reported compliance figures checked at 36 × 10⁻⁶ cm/dyne horizontally and 17.5 vertically, with a low-frequency resonance in the SME test arm sitting well below 10 Hz and contributing no audible ill effects to the response. The review also noted one minor assembly issue that it judged of no audible consequence — a fair summary of a part whose whole purpose was incremental improvement rather than reinvention.

For collectors, the VN-15E is an odd case. It is a consumable, so most of them were used up decades ago, and the surviving stock tends to be either new-old-stock pulls or lightly used examples. The part is only worth something alongside the cartridge it fits. A VN-15E with no V-15 Type II body to sit in is a curiosity, not a component. Buyers should look for the red "Shure" lettering on the grip, which is the period-documented way to tell the improved stylus from the earlier one, and should treat any listing that can't show it with suspicion. The 1975 classifieds in the British press show unused VN15E styli changing hands for as little as £5.