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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 whart

whart's avatar
whart
3,173 posts
 

I can think of a few great preamps from the "golden era" with good phono stages, including the Marantz Consolettes (never heard them with the "bridge") and the tube 7 (often called a 7C but the C was for the cabinet). The ARC SP3-a-1 was great in its day and there is apparently an update for it. I ran an ARC SP-10mkii for years- great sounding, but it was very microphonic.

I think the trend toward "separates" probably coincided with the advent of digital front ends- why pay for a phono stage if you don't need it? And there was a period where there were not as many phono stages marketed as there are now. I remember when I was setting up the system I have now- and trying to hunt down an Expressive Technologies step up to use for the SP-10. Pretty scarce in the wild. 

I wound up going the line stage-phono stage route. I requires an extra piece of interconnect, which is a potential downside. On the upside, I roll the power supply tube in the phono stage, which makes a huge difference in the overall voicing of the system. 

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