The fact that most audiophiles used a "full function" preamplifier back in the 60s, 70s, and even into the 80s, rather than a dedicated phono stage does not in my book mean that phono was taken for granted or given the short end of the stick. In fact in my view the current trend toward separate linestages and phono stages is to some degree a way of extracting more dollars from audiophiles, on the part of manufacturers. There is no reason why a preamplifier, including both a line and phono stage of the highest quality, cannot exist on one chassis. To get to Nirvana, most such gear uses an outboard power supply. A linestage is a very simple add-on to a great phono stage. When I see $20,000 and up stand alone linestages, I am shocked. Shocked I tell you!
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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@lewm +1 totally agree with your last post. |
To be clear, there were separate high end phono stages in the 70's & 80's - just not in the magazines. There are audio companies outside of the US. Examples would be Analog Devices AD-E1 ( Japan, price 1.7million yen in the late 80's ), Burmester ( Germany, 838 phono in 83 ( cheapie ) ), Final Audio/Takai Labs ( Japan, 70's, bespoke phono stages with up to 4 phono inputs ), Mactone ( Japan, 60's ). There were plenty of others.
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- 99 posts total