Abstract: In view of the influence of the load contact conditions on Brazilian test results, the acoustic emission (AE) monitoring system was used to conduct a Brazilian test of hard and brittle low-porosity sandstone under linear/non-linear load contact conditions. The standard Brazilian discs with a diameter of 50 mm and a thickness of 25 mm were instrumented with a three-dimensional sensor array containing eight Nano30 sensors. All the discs were equipped with identical three-dimensional sensor arrays. At the same load rate, the Brazilian discs were quasi-statically loaded under both linear/non-linear loads. The Richter 8 acquisition system continuously recorded waveform signals from eight channels from load application to brittle failure. Under the linear/non-linear load conditions, 1131 and 931 AE events were successfully located by a P-wave automatic picking and collapsing grid search algorithm. Under the linear/non-linear load condition, the crack initiation points were both away from the disc center. For non-central crack initiation, the tensile strength test may underestimate the true value. A pole density analysis of the planes under nonlinear load conditions shows that the local distortion of the fracture is greater than that under linear load. The evolution of the 3D damage to the disc shows that the load area of the disc significantly affects the cumulative time of damage, amount of energy liberation and stability of the crack propagation. The moment tensor decomposition was performed on the effective AE events, and the isotropic (ISO) component, the pure double-coupled (DC) and the compensated linear vector dipole (CLVD) component frequency percentage were obtained. The classification method was applied to quantitatively analyze the focal mechanism. The results show that the Brazilian test is not sensitive to the load contact conditions, and the focal mechanism of both cases can be interpreted as the initiation, propagation, and penetration of the tensile and shear microcracks approximately along the load direction.