Stanton Model 371 Stereo FLUXVALVE Pickup
A miniature stereo cartridge from the early stereo era, sold under the Stanton name by Pickering & Company of Plainview, New York.
Overview
The Model 371 is a stereo phono cartridge from the first wave of stereo. Mono LP owners were being coaxed toward the new two-channel format, and cartridge makers were racing to build something that could play both. The 371 was part of Pickering & Company's "STEREBILITY" series. The spelling is inconsistent across the period advertisements, appearing as both STEREBILITY and STEREOBILITY. The series was announced alongside the STANTON 45X45 compatible stereo FLUXVALVE pickup. The 371 itself was marketed as the "Miniature Stereo FLUXVALVE cartridge," a smaller sibling to the integrated arm-and-cartridge assemblies Pickering sold to the same customers.
The period advertising makes clear that the 371 was sold as a cartridge for a conventional tonearm. The "A" in the Model 371A Mk II refers to the V-GUARD stylus intended for transcription arms. The "C" variant was for record changers. This distinction mattered in 1958-59: a broadcast-style transcription arm and the clumsier mechanics of an automatic changer were different enough that Pickering sold the same cartridge body with different stylus assemblies for each. The Model 371C Mk II was the changer version and the Model 371A Mk II was the transcription-arm version. Both used the same FLUXVALVE generator.
"FLUXVALVE" was Pickering's house term for its moving-magnet generator design, and it appears throughout the company's cartridge line of the period. The 371 was explicitly positioned as a miniature version of that generator, sold as a bare cartridge rather than as part of the Model 196 UNIPOISE integrated arm assembly. Owners who wanted the Pickering arm-and-cartridge combination bought the 196. Those who already had an arm, or who wanted a standard-mount cartridge, bought the 371.
The Stereo Transition Problem
The 371 existed because of an awkward transitional moment. In 1958 and 1959, most record collections were still mono, and the stereo LP was brand new. A cartridge buyer needed something that would play both, and play them well, without swapping styli or flipping a switch every time a record changed. Pickering's answer across the STEREOBILITY line was the "compatible" stereo cartridge: a single generator that would track a mono microgroove record without damage and reproduce a stereo record in two channels.
The period advertising leans hard on this compatibility pitch. The STANTON 45X45 was described as the "first of the STEREOBILITY Series," and the 371 was sold as the miniature member of that family. The T-GUARD stylus assembly, with its 0.7 mil diamond, was promoted as the answer to the stacking problem. It would play all microgroove records, mono or stereo, without "bothersome plugging, switching or other manipulations," and could even be used on a record changer for fully automatic operation. That last point was the real selling proposition. A changer owner could stack a pile of mixed mono and stereo records and let the machine do the work.
Hi-Fi Music at Home (February 1959, p.18) ran the Pickering advertisement for the STEREOBILITY line, describing the STANTON Model 371 as the miniature stereo FLUXVALVE cartridge offered alongside the Model 196 UNIPOISE arm — the same pitch that ran in Audio (January 1959, p.19) and High Fidelity (January 1959, p.4). The repetition across three major hi-fi magazines in the same month tells you how hard Pickering was pushing the STEREOBILITY story in early 1959. This was a full-court press, not a niche product announcement.
Pricing and Positioning
The 371 was the value entry in the STEREOBILITY family. In the September 1959 Audio advertisement, the Model 371A Mk II was listed at $26.40 and the Model 371C Mk II at $24.00. Both were described as reduced prices, the result of what Pickering called its "PAC" (Pickering Automated Craftsmanship) manufacturing technique, which the company claimed had "effected economies in manufacture which permit a reduction in the price." The same advertisement listed the Model 196 UNIPOISE arm with integrated Stanton stereo FLUXVALVE pickup at $49.50, and the Collector's Ensemble Model 380E at $60.00. So the 371 sat below the integrated arm assembly and well below the top Collector's Series. It was the cartridge for the buyer who already had an arm or wanted to spend the money elsewhere in the system.
The A and C versions are easy to mix up. The A version, at $26.40, carried the D3807A V-GUARD stylus for transcription arms. The C version, at $24.00, carried the D3807C V-GUARD stylus for auto-changer arms. The $2.40 price difference bought a stylus assembly tuned for the lighter, more precise tracking of a broadcast-style arm. Buyers who owned a changer and bought the C version got the same generator with a stylus suited to the changer's heavier tracking requirements.
What the Numbers Mean
The published specifications for the STEREOBILITY family, and by extension the 371, describe a cartridge built to the standards of the late 1950s rather than the audiophile arms race that followed. Response was quoted as flat from 20 to 20,000 cps within ±2 dB, with channel separation of 25 dB or better. Output was 10 mV for a stylus velocity of 5 cm/sec. Those are respectable figures for the period, and a 25 dB separation spec was a real claim in 1959, when stereo cartridges were still being sorted out. But they are the manufacturer's own numbers, not independent measurements. The 20 Hz - 20 kHz ±2 dB claim in particular is the kind of figure that looked good on a spec sheet and depended heavily on the test conditions.
The cartridge body had four terminals plus an optional metal-case ground to prevent ground loops with metal tonearms. Grounding problems were a common source of hum in mixed-metal systems at the time. The four-terminal arrangement was the standard stereo hookup.
The 371's physical design was described as "miniature," which in 1959 meant a cartridge small enough to fit a range of standard-mount arms without the bulk of the earlier mono FLUXVALVE bodies. The "hermetically sealed in lifetime polystyrene" language in the period advertising for the Model 196 arm assembly suggests the same construction ran through the family: sealed generators, no user serviceable internals, and a stylus assembly designed to be swapped as a unit.
The Pickering–Stanton Relationship
The branding confuses collectors today. The Model 371 was sold as a "Stanton Stereo FLUXVALVE" cartridge, but the advertising was placed by Pickering & Company, Inc. of Plainview, New York. In the late 1950s, Stanton was a Pickering brand. The STANTON name appeared on the STEREOBILITY series and on the Model 196 UNIPOISE integrated arm, while the Pickering name carried the Pro-Standard and Collector's Series lines. The two names were used more or less interchangeably in the period advertising, and the same Plainview address appears on both. A 371 sold as a "Stanton" cartridge in a Pickering advertisement is normal, as is finding the two names together on the same page. The split into separate companies came later. In 1959 the 371 was a Pickering product sold under the Stanton name.
This matters for anyone trying to date or identify a 371 today. The cartridge itself will carry the Stanton name, and the documentation, if any survives, will be Pickering literature. The Model 371A Mk II and 371C Mk II designations in the September 1959 Audio advertisement indicate that the cartridge had already been through at least one revision by then. The original 371, as announced in the June 1958 Audio advertisement alongside the 45X45, was the "miniature stereo FLUXVALVE cartridge" without the Mk II suffix. The Mk II versions are the ones most commonly documented in the period press.
Reception and the Historical Record
The 371's reception is difficult to reconstruct, because the period coverage is almost entirely advertising rather than independent review. The STEREOBILITY series was advertised heavily in Audio, High Fidelity, and Hi-Fi Music at Home through 1958 and 1959, and the same copy, "where quality starts... and the music begins," ran across multiple titles and months. No measured review of the 371 itself survives in the available record, so there is no independent test of how it performed against its published specs. The advertising claims are the manufacturer's.
The advertising does establish the cartridge's intended market. The 371 was sold to the music-minded hobbyist who wanted a stereo cartridge that would handle a mixed collection, who already owned or planned to own a standard-mount tonearm, and who was willing to pay roughly twenty-five dollars for the generator. That was serious money in 1959, the equivalent of a few hundred dollars today, but it was the entry point to the STEREOBILITY line, not the top of it. The Collector's Ensemble at $60 and the integrated Model 196 arm at $49.50 were the premium options. The 371 was for the buyer building a system around an existing arm.
The Garrard connection appears in the period advertising. A Pickering advertisement reproduced in the September 1959 Audio carried a testimonial from Walter O. Stanton, president of Pickering and Co., endorsing the Garrard changer with the Pickering FLUXVALVE cartridge, and showing the Stanton Stereo FLUXVALVE Model 371 mounted in a shell. The claim was that more FLUXVALVEs were in Garrard changers than in all other turntables and changers combined. That is marketing, not an independent finding, but it shows where the 371 was expected to end up: in Garrard changers owned by hobbyists who wanted stereo without giving up automatic operation. The C version, with its changer-specific stylus, was the one those buyers wanted.
Collectibility Today
The 371 is a period piece rather than a collector's trophy. It belongs to the first generation of stereo cartridges, and its value today is historical rather than sonic. A working example is a fair artifact of the stereo transition, but it is not the cartridge a modern listener would choose for playing records. The original styli are long out of production, and a 371 with a worn or missing stylus is a display piece unless a compatible replacement can be found. The hermetically sealed construction that Pickering promoted as a reliability feature in 1959 is, sixty-odd years later, a serviceability problem. The generator is not designed to be opened, and a failed channel means a failed cartridge.
Prices for surviving examples are modest, and the cartridge is more often found as part of a period system, mounted in a Garrard changer or a Pickering arm, than sold on its own. The stylus is the limiting factor. A 371 with a good original stylus is a different proposition from one with a worn or missing stylus, and the price reflects that. The A and C versions are not interchangeable in practice, since the stylus assemblies are different, so confirm which version you are getting before assuming a particular stylus will fit.
The 371 is a document of a specific moment: the year or two when stereo was new, compatibility was the selling point, and Pickering was pushing the STANTON name across a full line of cartridges and arms. It is not a landmark product in the way the later Stanton audiophile cartridges would become.
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