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How to deal with a 1.0mV LOMC or is it HOMC

I have a vintage cartridge on its way to me and despite being very excited, I am also very curious as to how I should load it into a standard MM stage. It is spec'd at 1.0mV and 60ohms.

For my current LOMC's I use a step up transformer that has a 15x, 20x and 50x step up ratios. I calculated if I use the lowest setting of 15x and based on the load impedance of 60ohms, the MM stage of my amplifier would see an output of 11mV which would seem very high.

Alternatively if I took the step up transformer out of the chain the MM stage would only see 1.0mV which is way too low.

Can anyone advise how they have dealt with carts which have such an unusual output.
ateal

Showing 1 response by raymonda

raymonda
855 posts
 
That would be a medium output, which could present some issues with MM phono section. Also, normally MM sections are set to 47K ohms and if your cartridge is in the 100-400 area it may sound overly bright.

As a frame of reference, there is no way I can run my Benz M.9 into a MM section. It does not have enough gain and it sounds like crap because it needs to be loaded at 100 ohms.
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