Phono preamp worth it with MM cartridges?

Chak, I hope you understand that I am agreeing with you about 30K ohms.  Got that?  I personally have found most often that 100K ohms sounds best with many of my MMs.  This started with the Grado TLZ or XTZ which I know we both like. The TLZ sounded best with 100K ohms load.  I have actually never tried less than 47K ohms.  Also, in many cases it's a trade-off with capacitance.  If you increase R above 47K there would be a corresponding change in the best capacitative load.  If you don't want to mess around with C, you can just play with R (more or less) until you get the best result with whatever is the total C load seen by the phono stage.  You don't even have to know exactly the value of C, just change R until you are happy.

Chak, To be clear, I was only questioning the "30"; you left out the "K".  I now see how you meant it.  Of course I do agree that for some MM cartridges 30K might work fine or even optimally, but not 30 ohms ever for any MM cartridge.  I just did not want the OP or anyone else to be confused.
On the subject of Clearaudio MM cartridges, some of them are excellent but at least one of the best is just a re-branded and externally altered version of a less expensive MM made by a main line Japanese company. Do some research on that, and you can save a significant fraction of cost.  I don't know if this applies to more than one of their MMs.

Chak, do you really think an MM phono stage needs the option of 30 ohms loading? Or was that a typo, and you may have meant 30K or 30,000 ohms, which does make sense?


Buy the very best MM phono stage you can afford, but don’t assume cost and quality are proportional. If you succeed in reaching that goal, you may never need to “upgrade” if you purchase a LOMC cartridge, because you can add a SUT or pre-preamp for more gain. To get where you want to be is a process of trial and error for each one of us. No one can tell you what you will like. I’d suggest Sim Audio, Herron, Hageman, K&K units with at least 40db gain or any excellent used unit to save money.