Burne-Jones & Co Ltd.

The grooves on disc gramophone records have nearly always been cut with a tool running parallel across the disc so that the groove walls are not distorted at any point across the disc. However, they are usually played with a tracking or pick-up arm pivoted at one point at the side of the turntable. This leads to small but noticeable tracking error affecting reproduction. This error is minimised by careful design of the tracking arm. Another way to minimise errors was developed by Peter Burne-Jones. He designed a pivoted parallel tracking arm which allowed the pick-up always to track tangentially to the groove and reduced tracking error almost to zero. It was bought and used by many hi-fi enthusiasts for more than a decade but was technically only a qualified success because the design was complicated and more expensive to make than a conventional arm, and to keep down cost low-quality bearings were used. The arm was therefore not as rigid as a standard arm.

The company was also involved in the manufacture of radio receivers for the blind and will be a useful primary reference source for historians.