The only outboard phono amps I remember from the 70’s and 80’s were MC “step up” transformers. I also found some mainstream equipment with above average phono stages. NAD 3020 (when it worked), Sansui AU 717, Pioneer Spec 1 preamp.
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"
- ...
- 70 posts total
@motown-l brings up an interesting point. We had some superb SUTs in the 60s and 70s. Those are the references even today. But reference MM stages? Can’t think of any |
Keith at Darlington Audio has an excellent History of Audio and Phono Preamps on his site, giving context to the phono stage in relation to other audio developments. Could it be that the explosion of the CD sidetracked further innovation of an standalone reference phono preamp? |
Pani, I don't know what country you live in, but in the USA, when LOMC cartridges were first introduced in the early to mid 70s, most audiophiles owned phono stages with only MM levels of gain. Everyone needed a gain booster of some kind in order to appreciate the new idea in cartridges. At that point in time, the first products in the US market were not SUTs, as I recall. They were "head amps" or "pre-preamps", most prominently I remember the one marketed by Mark Levinson and designed by John Curl, the JC1. For tube aficionados there was also the Counterpoint SA2, eventually. I owned one; it was noisy but good sounding. SUTs came along later, at least here in the US. Someone mentioned the MFA Luminescence C. I owned two of them (consecutively, not both at the same time). While it was "good", it would not hold a candle to any of the more modern phono stages I have owned and used extensively, to include Raul's 3160 Phonolinepreamp, the Atma-sphere MP1, the Silvaweld SH550, the Manley Steelhead. Not that any of these could be regarded as recent designs, if you define "recent" with a 5-year envelope. Sometimes nostalgia makes us see with rose-colored glasses. But on the other hand, RIAA has not changed and the subject of how to effect the RIAA filter has been done to death (with resistors and capacitors, or with R, C, and inductors, or with inductors and resistors, or in the digital domain, or using an IC which may effect any of the preceding components to get the job done). So, yes, there has to be some me-too-ism in the most modern designs. So why is there a bee in your bonnet? |
I remember attending a Boston Audio Society meeting in the late 70s at which Tomlinson Holman spoke on what prompted him to re-think his ideas on phono preamp design, which led to the Advent 300 receiver's much ballyhooed MM section, and later the full-blown version in the Apt/Holman preamp. He was testing an unnamed "standard solid state preamp" versus that of a Dynaco PAS tube preamp and found that the HF overload characteristics on the tube preamp were far better. He then focused on designing a SS circuit that matched the characteristics of the PAS closely, which went into the Model 300. Curiously, this vignette is absent from the excellent history linked above by djspinner...West Coast bias? |
- 70 posts total