Tube or solid state phono stage?

I’m intrigued by the balanced inputs of the BAT. Does anyone know if that adds anything to the sound quality from a turntable input?

@stewartgr I do! We've been making balanced tube preamps (with balanced tube phono sections) longer than anyone else worldwide.

The thing that balanced line is supposed to bring to the table is immunity to cable artifacts (and also immunity to ground loops). If you've ever auditioned cables and heard a difference you know what I'm talking about. To do this you have to support the balanced line standard also known as AES48. Its handy also if the source is also very low impedance.

In the case of a LOMC cartridge, both aspects are there. So the real issue is the tonearm cable if your phono section has a balanced input. I think we can all agree that if there is any place in the system where the cable has to get it right, its the tonearm cable since it will not matter how good your preamp, amps and speakers are, nothing downstream can fix a problem introduced upstream.

In a nutshell you get a signal from the phono that is more accurate and natural.

That weird ground wire that no other single-ended source seems to need goes away; that is used when you are connecting a balanced source to a single-ended input. Instead the ground connection is the shield of the cable and is tied to pin 1 of the XLRs of each channel. This works very well with arms that use a 5 pin DIN connector and its also possible if the tonearm has RCA outputs with a ground post (we make a special cable for that but any competent technician can too).

The tonearm cable does not have to be expensive! All it needs to be is low capacitance and built correctly.

I’m worried a tube phono stage may make the vinyl too warm sounding and not dynamic enough.

@stewartgr Dynamics only comes from the signal. If it seems to come from the electronics, its because of distortion.

Its much harder to build solid state phono sections that don't have problems with RFI. The reason this is important is LOMC cartridges generate RFI while playing. If the phono section can't handle it (and it can be as much as 30dB higher level than the signal itself) then it likely won't sound right. This has resulted in the use of 'cartridge loading resistors' which are really for the benefit of the phono section because they kill the RFI.

So if the manufacturer has a front panel 'loading' switch there's a pretty good chance they don't understand how this works. Actually its electronics 101 in the first week of college; when you put an inductance (the cartridge) in parallel with a capacitance (the tonearm cable) then you get an electrical resonance. In the case of LOMC cartridges this can be up to 5MHz. You can also search to see if people are using loading resistors with cartridges while using the phono section you have in mind.

A nice side benefit of the phono preamp being insensitive to RFI is its very likely you'll get less ticks and pops. That RFI I mentioned can overload the input of the phono section and when that happens it can generate ticks and pops.