Are there any advantages to mc over mm?


I am kinda lost here, I will ask the audiogon community. With my high output benz wood mc cartridge is there any advantage of using mc side over the mm on my phono stage? Thanks,scott
52tiger
Use whichever sounds better; high output MCs are intended to be used with MM inputs in most cases as the additional gain in not needed and a good rule of thumb is to use no more gain than you need. However; there are always exceptions and yours might sound better to you through the MC input. Try it either way as long as you are not overloading the MC stage, which is unlikely but possible.
The difference in most cases is the load impedance the cartridge sees. Typically mm inputs are 47k ohms while mc inputs are 50 to 100 ohms. In many phono stages you can adjust these so look up what the particular cartridge wants to be loaded with and use that input. Your cartridge is secified as 1000 to 47k ohms so it should work good into the mm input
Additionally, depending on the input sensitivity and headroom of your MC stage, the output of the Benz might cause overload. This isn't likely to damage anything (except your ears, if you forget to reduce the gain control!) but it could cause some audible distortion, particularly on dynamic peaks.

As Stanwal said, listen and decide for yourself which sounds better.
The most important difference is of course the price. The
most intricate question : why are some buying > $ 8K MC
carts while they can buy MM carts which are according to
some 'as good' for, say, $300? But then there are
mechanical watches for $ 300.000 while even better 'time
watcher' one can get for $ 30. The human kind is inscrutable.
Regards,