Do yourself a favor and find yourself a used Artemis Labs Ph-1. This is an all-tubed design providing roughly 52 dB of gain without the use of SUT’s or FETS/Solid State gain devices! Pure tube, with a natural organic tone to voice and acoustic musical instruments; and dynamics that can make you jump.
It gives you the ability to adjust loading to your liking from 50 Ohms to 47500 Ohms by simply adding resistors in parallel via zif sockets on the back panel. ***I personally would not ever buy a phono stage that didn’t offer you the ability of having an infinite customization of it’s load impedance. Being able to definitively match your specific cartridge can certainly make the difference from good to outstanding sound reproduction.*** It also utilizes readily available small signal triode tubes from the 6np1, 12AX7, and 5687 families.
This will work great with medium to high output Moving Coil cartridges to Moving Magnet cartridges all on it own, or you can certainly add an outboard SUT if you wish to use low output MC’s.
I think I paid about $3000 for mine new, but I would think you could find a nice used example in your price range. I currently have the latest reference level 5 Wavestream Kinetics Deluxe phono amp $8995 (which also is an all tube design eschewing the use of SUT’s/FETS and also has adjustable loading on the back panel), but I can’t imagine letting my Artemis Labs PH-1 go. I will keep it for either back up use duties or if I ever set up a secondary analog system.... that’s how much I love it!
Dick Olsher gave a great review of this phono stage in http://www.enjoythemusic.com/magazine/equipment/0805/artemisph1.htm if you’d like to learn more about it.
Best wishes,
Don
It gives you the ability to adjust loading to your liking from 50 Ohms to 47500 Ohms by simply adding resistors in parallel via zif sockets on the back panel. ***I personally would not ever buy a phono stage that didn’t offer you the ability of having an infinite customization of it’s load impedance. Being able to definitively match your specific cartridge can certainly make the difference from good to outstanding sound reproduction.*** It also utilizes readily available small signal triode tubes from the 6np1, 12AX7, and 5687 families.
This will work great with medium to high output Moving Coil cartridges to Moving Magnet cartridges all on it own, or you can certainly add an outboard SUT if you wish to use low output MC’s.
I think I paid about $3000 for mine new, but I would think you could find a nice used example in your price range. I currently have the latest reference level 5 Wavestream Kinetics Deluxe phono amp $8995 (which also is an all tube design eschewing the use of SUT’s/FETS and also has adjustable loading on the back panel), but I can’t imagine letting my Artemis Labs PH-1 go. I will keep it for either back up use duties or if I ever set up a secondary analog system.... that’s how much I love it!
Dick Olsher gave a great review of this phono stage in http://www.enjoythemusic.com/magazine/equipment/0805/artemisph1.htm if you’d like to learn more about it.
Best wishes,
Don