While not truly "reference quality," I am using a Lounge Audio Gold phono stage with my Rogue RP-7 Tube preamp and Odyssey SS mono bloc power amps driving Fyne F-702 speakers, and the sound is remarkable, with excellent tonal qualities, supeprrb vocals, an a wonderful sound-stage, laterally, in depth, and vertically. While memories going back into the late 1980s and early 1990s are of dubious value, my previous system I am comparing with was the same Thorens TD 126 MKII TT--now with an Audio Technical 540 ML cartridge, a Yamaha C-2x preamplifier (which was reputed to have a superb phono stage), and a McIntosh MC2120 power amplifier, driving Infinity RS-IIb speakers. I do not recall my older system sounding anything like my current one, especially with some of the higher quality LPs, such as the Sheffields or the 45 rpm LPs I have. While perhaps not reference quality, I see no need to swap anything out at this point.
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"
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@maverick2108 Thank you |
I have a Precision Fidelity C7A Revised, which began in the '70's as the C7. It's pretty much a dedicated phono stage, as the other circuitry's passive. It's really great- nothing tragic about it. As to the point of this discussion, it serves as evidence the phono preamp was attracting the attention of designers and listeners in this era. I remember reading somewhere Absolute Sound compared it favorably with the SP6 and others of that order back in the day. Checked out the Darlington thread mentioned above- wow, pretty impressive. But saw no mention of Bruce Moore or Precision Fidelity . . . |
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