New to Vinyl. Need help on how to match components, cartridge, etc...


Are there any good resources you can recommend to educate ones self on how to match up a cartridge to the phono preamp  and phono preamp to a preamp? What are the consideration when it comes to gain and output/input impedance? 
mvrooman1526

Showing 2 responses by millercarbon

@millercarbon I have Bryston 7B3 amps which have a very low input impedance (7.5k unbalanced / 5k balanced) so I stuck with a Bryston Premp which has an output impedance of 72 ohms. This is my concern.

Yes well there you go. So you know first hand just how limiting one choice can be. Its very easy if you're not careful to wind up with a system so precariously matched that changing one thing means messing everything else up- and so that in itself becomes a huge obstacle to improvement. 


Everyone should of course read Robert Harley’s Complete Guide to High End Audio. That said, keep it simple. Phono stage to pre-amp, unless you’ve made some a very questionable choice in pre-amps then any combination will work just fine. So you can forget about that one. The main thing you need to understand, if you pick a low output MC (arbitrarily defined by me as below 0.3mV) you can expect to have a lot more challenges than if you pick a medium output (again arbitrarily defined by me as above 0.3mV) cartridge.

This is NOT to say buy a cartridge based on output. Its simply a way of winnowing down the field by eliminating the ones that are most likely to pose a challenge.

Limiting yourself to a nice medium output MC (or any MM) will free up virtually all phono stages on the market. You won’t have to worry about gain, or step up transformers, and noise will be much less of a concern too.

Then armed with this one simple rule now you are free to focus on what really matters, sound quality. THAT is the way to match components. NOT to each other but TO YOU!