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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
lewm
13,627 posts
 

Every phono stage in history up to about 10 years ago used CR type RIAA filtering. The Citation IV was pretty nice for an early SS effort. HP loved it, I think.

pani OP
1,231 posts
 

I started this thread. Few points made so far is very interesting but some are confusing too

  1. I have been referring to phonostages of the Vintage era. Late 90s is not vintage. It was when good standalone phonostages started coming in. My concern is why didn’t we have great standalone phonostages from 50s to 80s ?
  2. Most phonostages referred so far from the 70s and 80s have been termed as nice but noisy. Not great by today’s standards. That’s what i am trying to say too. They didn’t great standalone stages
  3. To rephrase my own OP, I don’t know of any top quality phonostage from the vintage era that is sought after and worth putting into a high end system. This is in stark contrast to other analog components which still appreciates in price for their high sonic performance. 
     

The point of all this discussion is, if high end standalone phono-stages is a modern concept (like DACs and Streamers) without any legacy to refer, there is still a lot of innovation left to be done and given that analog is such a small market, not sure if there ever will be some final designs like we have for TTs and cartridges 

 

pani OP
1,231 posts
 

The reason I write all this is, when i look around for a high end natural sounding phonostage, there are very very few. I can count them on one hand. This is without bothering about cost. I have heard a huge number of stages so far. Most of them sound wrong or low res. High res and natural is super rare. The art of keeping natural authentic music intact while improving resolution is missing among most of the “audiophile” designers. Typically i fall back on old school reference units in such situations but was surprised there are no such examples to be considered from the yesteryear. They are all average stuff by today’s resolution standard. That’s the reason i call this an analog tragedy 

lewm
13,627 posts
 

One could write a thousand words on this subject, but suffice to say that while no one can say that your dissatisfaction with modern phono stages is "wrong" (because you are entitled to that opinion), one might fairly say that your thesis for why there is a dearth of superb phono stages (in your opinion) is skating on thin ice and maybe not worth debating. I wish you good luck in finding something that finally makes you happy, but ask yourself if that is really possible. I personally have found that by first educating myself on the relevant aspects of electronics, I have been able to modify commercial gear that is already very good and bring it up to a level of performance that I find very satisfying and which doesn’t leave me yearning for anything better, though I try to keep an open mind in case something better does come along.  So far, current drive (for one example) as represented by the few such units I’ve heard, is not an answer. But then again, I am not about to spend $90,000 on a phono stage.

mdalton's avatar
mdalton
586 posts
 

@lewm

Am no expert but don’t think that’s right re CR type filtering.  Pretty sure early Macs, Marantz 7, Fischer 400, and many others used negative feedback in their phono stages.  

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