It turns out the the DD does experience wear or damage, pick the one you like. And when does wear become damage? A properly setup and maintained linear tracking arm with a modern low mass high compliance cartridge will cause minimum damage to the grove walls. If you cling tenaciously to the pivoted tone arm with its changeable geometry and steel needle that needle will wear the grove as it rotates in the grove. You will be shaving rock dust off of the side walls as well as continuously reshaping the needle. Looks like damage to me. Ron L wrote: <SNIP> > I think Greg Boganz mentioned the lack of wear on DDs on the Electrola list > recently. It is not entirely because of the tone arm and has to do with > vertical grooves and the nature of the DD surface. > > Ron L