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Phono Stage - The great analog tragedy

In the world of analog playback, there is an interesting observation. There has been tremendous innovation in the field of 
Turntable - Direct, Idler, Belt
Cartridge - MM, MC, MI
Tonearm - Gimbal, Unipivot, Linear Tracking

For all of the above designs we find some of the best reference components designed in the 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s. Most of the modern products are inspired from these extraordinary products of the past. But when it comes to phono stage, there is hardly any "reference component" from that era. They just standardized RIAA curve for sanity and left it. Manufacturers made large preamps and amps and allocated a puny 5% space for a small phono circuit even in their reference models, like a necessary evil. They didn’t bother about making it better. 

The result? It came down to the modern designers post 2000 after vinyl resurgence to come up with serious phono stages for high end systems. Unfortunately they don’t have any past reference grade designs to copy or get inspired from. Effectively, just like DACs, reference phono stages is also an evolving concept, and we don’t have too many choices when we want a really good one which is high-res and natural sounding. Very few in the world have figured out a proper high end design so far. And most of the decent ones have been designed in the past couple of decades. The best of the breed are probably yet to come.  

It is a tragedy that our legendary audio engineers from the golden era didn’t focus on the most sensitive and impactful component, "the phono stage"

pani

Showing 1 response by avanti1960

avanti1960
1,586 posts
 

@pani 

Good topic for discussion, thanks.  I do not particularly believe that the lack of good phono stages capable of supporting low output moving coil cartridges in the "golden era" e.g. pre 1980 was a tragedy.  The better amplifiers and preamplifiers of the day did an excellent job at cleanly amplifying the signal of the better Moving Magnet cartridges of that era, 

Aside from the Denons and Ortofon SPU (which each historically used SUTS for the first amplification stage), LOMCs did not start becoming popular until after 1980 or so.  In which case it was an analog tragedy that neither existed in the golden age.  

However the industry has since responded quite well as there are a number of very high quality internal and external phono preamps that can support the best of the best LOMCs.  I would argue the golden age of vinyl playback is NOW.  

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