Help me pick a phono, pre and cart

Hm. Sounds like raul is a bu$ine$$man looking to sell his preamp, but actually prefers digital (I didn't make that up):
https://forum.audiogon.com/discussions/phono-preamps-with-balls

Here's an excerpt from that thread:

A CD with a top DAC ( 32bits/384 khz.) and good overall design outperforms any phono stage it does not matters the phono stage price/pedigree ( including yours. ) in the bass " management " and this is not because your unit or other units are not good designs because I know your design is a good one but it’s because the differences between a digital and LP recording technics.

The recording microphones pick up all the music in stereo including the bass range but for the LP overall limitations the low bass comes not in stereo as when in the recording but in mono way when in digital comes as what were pick up by those recording session microphones, digital has no limitations about.

That is one of multiple reasons why digital outperforms LP/analog in the bass no matter what.

I repeat, it’s not your quality unit design but the " medium " limitations. No contest by analog in this regards against digital.

-and yet he calls me a liar for it.


As I said on that thread, I've yet to hear a digital system at any price have more bass impact than analog. Raul misses a key ingredient here- its probably not that digital hardware is inherently inferior in this regard. What raul doesn't seem to understand is the industry is the problem- CDs are expected to be played in a car so they are compressed as a result. LPs have no such expectation and so have less compression or none at all. This results in more bass impact.

@bpoletti It has to, Ohm's Law and such.

How much it does so is not as well researched, but I've seen a good number of audiophiles do loading by ear- essentially dialing out brightness by using a potentiometer as the loading resistor and when they felt they had it right, replaced the pot with a fixed value. I've done this myself.

But loading does not affect the output of a LOMC cartridge insofar as the coil is concerned- this is because the inductance is so low that it basically doesn't ring at audio frequencies. I know this from having passed squarewaves through such cartridges and observing the effect of the cartridge coils on an oscilloscope (BTW this is not for the faint of heart- one screwup and you could degauss the magnet or damage the coil).

So there are really only two explanations for why loading kills brightness, and stopping the ringing in the cartridge is not one of them (although in high output MM cartridges loading does affect the cartridge at audio frequencies). The two explanations are:1) the preamp is bright due to RFI; removing the RFI corrects the problem2) the cartridge is less able to respond to high frequencies due to the extra work it has to do.
The problem with the first explanation is that by varying the load, you can vary the brightness like a tone control. It should be that once the load has killed the RF resonance, that the preamp is OK. However, the peak that we are concerned about is a good 30db higher than that of the signal, and by detuning it only a little it can still have an effect. So the loading, if variable, should have a slight tone control effect. But you can load the cartridge so that its too dull... although I find that such might also just result in reduced output- a lot depends on the individual cartridge.

The problem with the second explanation is that its too disturbing. Once the RF resonance is killed, by decreasing the load value even further, we can still hear that highs are being decreased with *some* cartridges. This does suggest that the cartridge itself is becoming stiffer and less able to respond to higher frequencies. It may also mean that it does not track as well in some arms, that depending on the effective mass and resulting mechanical resonance which has been changed by the electrical loading.

IMO, this topic deserves more attention, since one of the main complaints against vinyl is ticks and pops, and one of the other complaints is the nuance required to get a proper setup. Both would be made easier if there were more light on this subject.

The one thing I have learned is that you'll want a phono stage that is highly adjustable if you want to use a moving coil cartridge. Loading can make the difference in SQ. I was interested in the Ayre phono stage as well but it did not have the correct loading available for my AMG cartridge and I ended up with a Musical Surrounding Nova II.

@joey54 If you have to load the cartridge to get it to sound right, this is a sign that the phono section is unstable and unhappy when RFI is applied to its input. Loading detunes the Radio Frequency resonant peak that is created by the inductance of the cartridge and the capacitance on the interconnect cable. This is why some phono preamps sound better when the cartridge is 'loaded'.

Cartridge manufacturers make loading recommendations because they have no idea if the phono section you're using is stable or not. Generally their recommendations are in fact that- very general, since they don't know the amount of capacitance in the tone arm cable either. If the phono section is stable, the stock 47K load will do the job.
A down side of loading is that you are causing the coils of the cartridge to drive a much lower impedance- meaning that they are doing more work. This extra energy comes from somewhere- the stylus in the groove- so when you employ lower impedances for loading you also reduce the compliance of the cartridge and its ability to track higher frequencies. Something to think about.

Most of the reputable tube dealers manually tested each NOS tube for low microphonics, low noise etc. Lucky people knows the difference between new and nos when it comes to the great tubes. I bet you have some decent NOS tubes yourself.

Anyway it’s a good news that your or herron preamps works great with stock new tubes.

BTW i really like the design of Atma-Sphere MP-1 and MP-3

Thanks!
Actually I don’t stash NOS tubes and I don’t use them. My thinking is I should be able to make it work with the garden variety of what’s available. Further, we usually find that the tube dealers really don’t have tubes as quiet as the new ones (we have found this out when customers have sometimes ignored our advice and tried to use NOS tubes). So I really mean it when I say we don’t recommend NOS tubes in our phono sections.

You're talking about the new tubes, not the expensive vintage NOS tubes that are by far superior to the any new tube. 12at7 is what you use? The very best of this type can be $50-150 each. Same with phono stages. The NOS tubes are extremely expensive if they are good. New tubes are not equal to the old tubes from the 50s,60s and even 70s. The owner of the tube gear will spend a fortune on the tubes.

@chakster 

Yes- new tubes. We don't recommend NOS tubes for either the output tubes or the phono tubes. In the case of the latter, its just too hard to find NOS tubes that are actually in fact quiet- those were sold off the shelves decades ago and all that are left now are the dregs unless someone got extremely lucky. So we don't recommend NOS tubes for our phono sections- we encourage people to use new tubes if they want the best noise floor and lowest microphonics.

does Ralph have a stand alone phono pre ?

@tomic601 We don't- we feel that a stand alone can't sound as good due to the cable connection problems and further, we have what seem to be the best line stage circuits anywhere owing to their unique direct-coupled outputs- they play bass better than other preamps (tube or solid state) and are fast in the mids and highs like solid state but without the glare.
We've considered a phono section many times, the problem is that to get around the interconnect connection issues we have to put in the circuitry that is in the output buffer of our preamps. The problem there is that the buffer (which is used to prevent the interconnect cable from having any effect on the sound at all, regardless of length or cost) has a slight gain loss, so when we add that, then its the same circuit we're making in our full function preamps! So literally the difference would be a phono section that was all the same circuit as we make now, only missing the input selector switches and volume control.

I've always been into vinyl- our preamps were built to optimize phono playback.

@chakster Just a FWIW: we get about 10,000 hours out of our power tubes and warranty all the tubes in our gear for a year.
This thread is about phono gear however, not power amps.

Folks, Raul is a digital aficionado. He’s not into vinyl so much as he appears to be into trolling.

You will all note that he did not deny my assertion- although he *said* he had heard our preamp, he does not deny that he *didn’t* when I called him on it, instead making an unrelated argument (a logical fallacy argument technique known as a Strawman; by definition such an argument is false...).

With regards to bass and highs, tubes can go from DC to many MHz (our preamp amps have full power bandwidth from 1Hz to 100KHz, with bandwidth intentionally limited to prevent damage to tweeters from RFI). Old school analog color TVs had to have DC to 10MHz bandwidth in their chroma amplifiers (which were for the red, green, and blue signals of the old analog color broadcast system), and that was done with tubes, some of which are in use in audio circuits today. Neither are there any solid state phono sections with response to DC; nor does the RIAA spec past 20KHz; so many phono sections, solid state included, don’t have serious bandwidth past about 50KHz or so; raul’s bandwidth comments appear uninformed.

Raul’s comments can thus be safely ignored, especially since he seems to have taken an apocryphal stance purely for trolling purposes.

Thanks- Any suggestion on playter pad upgrade?

@jetson I like the Oracle platter pad a lot. To use it properly, it is pretty well permanently stuck to the platter, so you will want to make sure the platter's bolts that secure it to the motor are not in place.

Not much. I would replace the platter pad, and if you want state of the art, the tone arm too (I use the Triplanar). Otherwise the ’table benefits from break in time and so seems to get better the more its used.

I’ve yet to hear a tube phono better solid state myself.

I have.

A lot depends on what you regard as important- IOW what’s ’better’. A lot of solid state guys cite noise as their number one concern, but once the noise floor is below that of the surface noise of the LP, the ear’s masking principle sees to it that you don’t hear it. But that might still be below -75db and that is doable with tubes. So that issue does not concern me- I don’t care if you lift the needle and can’t hear the phono noise unless you put your ear to the speaker drivers- when I’m listening to my stereo, the needle is on the record, not off of it :) To me its the musical presentation that counts.

The main thing for me is what distracts me from the music, and I think ticks and pops probably bother me most, followed closely by colorations, in particular, brightness. Both are easier to solve with tubes than solid state, so I find that a good tube phono section is easily better in this regard than most solid state; there are rare exceptions if the solid state designer was cognizant of the fact that the phono section contributes to ticks and pops if it has design flaws.

If in doubt, an excellent turntable with arm is the Technics SL1200G. Very non-resonant, speed is spot on, easy to set up.

boulder, Vitus, EAR, Lamm, Nagra, Parasound, Ayre, MBL, Music Reference/Berning, Air Tight, Atmasphere, Audio Research, C&J, Aesthetix, BAT, Audio Note, Levinson, Krell, SimsAudio, Pass, Sutherland, Halcro, Dartzeel, Einstein, Rogue, FM Acoustics, Manley, Cary, Classé, CAT , Doshi, Herron, Rowland, Crown, Mckintosh, Wavac, VTL, Chord, Linn, Moscode, Vac, YBA, Burmester, Threshold, Hovland, Denon, Luxman, Accuphase, Gryphon and many other that scape to my memory.

This statement is misleading. If Raul heard one of our preamps it certainly was not one made in the last ten years (and as you might expect, we've made improvements in that time, some of the most dramatic changes that affected the phono circuits only in the last three years). This causes me to put this list under suspicion as it strains credulity.

Tubes exist these days only for audio, and really for nothing else. That is what keeps the tube industry alive.
To make a tube preamp get the same sort of noise floor as solid state, you have to do similar things that solid state designers do- many use differential circuits as they are lower noise; tube circuits can be built that way with similar benefit.