mono cartridge vs stereo

Lew, thanks. Yes, I'm going to put it b/t my phono preamp and my linestage. I think I'll have BlueJeans Cable make one up for me to try it out. I'm assuming all it takes is making a normal set of cables, opening them up in the middle, soldering the hot wires together and soldering the ground wires together. Pretty simple. Someone should make a high quality adaptor that plugs right into your linestage to offer you a mono input. I guess the other way to do it, if you have a spare RCA input on your linestage, is just to solder a jumper across the two hot contacts on the RCA jacks. I'm wondering if that is all one would need to do. That is, given the ground configuration, if the grounds are all joined together anyhow. I might call VAC and ask them about that. It would be so easy to do with a small piece of wire, and I have the extra input...

Am I getting it right? Thanks, Peter

Guys, I have a single tonearm available to me, and it is set up for stereo. I've got two questions:

1) When using the Y adaptor, do you need two Y adaptors, one to sum the L+R channels and one to redistribute them back to L+R outputs?

2) If you definitely don't have a mono cartridge, is it better to buy stereo re-issues of mono LP's?

Oh, and two other things. I'm assuming that with the Y adaptor approach, you're not just taking one channel and splitting it into two. That you are in fact blending the two channels and then distributing the blended signal to two RCA's.

I should also add that I have an outboard phono preamp. I assume that I should place the double Y adaptor device between my phono preamp and my linestage preamp?

EBM - what you are saying is absolutist and contrary to what others have written. It seems you can use the Y adaptor approach, but you lose some fidelity. How much, I don't know. But most people don't have the capacity for two tonearms or the ability to quickly swap cartridges.

Thanks Bill. I don't have the flexibility to set up a mono cartridge on my turntable. Too much effort readjusting the VTA every time I would change. So I guess I'm stuck with using Y adapters, or on advice from VAC, I could strap together the positive pins of one of my inputs on the preamp to essentially create a mono input. I'm considering that approach, because I have extra RCA inputs.