Ceramic cartridge phono stage options?


A good friend is wanting to try a ceramic cart on one of his many tables. The biggest issue is finding a phono stage that can handle the carts particular requirements. We have read countless forms post with no real solution other then DYI'ing a phone stage for it. Add to that no one can seem to come to a solid design that more then one person can agree on. 

Do any of you have expedience with ceramic carts and their particular requirements? Is their an off the shelf phono stage for them anywhere out in internet land? 

glennewdick

Showing 2 responses by lewm

Also, I forgot to add, apparently some ceramic cartridges were built with internal RIAA correction in the form of a capacitor that induces a reverse RIAA curve at the output.  This is an inexact copy of RIAA, because it would not recreate the plateau seen in the RIAA curve, between 500Hz and (whatever the upper pole is and I am too lazy to look it up but around 2.2kHz). When you vary input Z with that fixed capacitance, that of course will alter the RIAA correction effected by the capacitor and make it even more inaccurate, if the load impedance is very different from the design goal.  All the more reason to find out about the provenance of any ceramic cartridge before use.  So there is no one size fits all solution for how to run a ceramic cartridge with modern equipment.

No one has defined the terms high vs low input impedance. In fact the early ceramics are said to work best into impedances >1Megohm. Tube linestages typically present an input impedance of 100K ohms or even less. I read elsewhere that input impedance has a bearing on the need for RIAA correction. Suffice to say this is a complex topic and the best approach seems to have been different for different ceramic cartridges.