Hey I'm late to the game on this one but I have a customer who was using a Lyra Etna (0.56mv) with a 1:20 into his VPS100. He wanted a bit more system gain so he went for a 1:40 and things went south quickly. The highs got ragged and the sound brash and he thought the SUT was broken. Since there is not much you can do to "break" a SUT I met up with him and put the setup on the test bench. A 1kHz sine wave was fin in both setups but moving up to 10kHz showed what was happening. The 10Khz into the 1:20 showed a slight increase of higher harmonics and moving to the 1:40 showed a dramatic increase which nicely coincided with what he was hearing.
All phono stages distort at frequencies first and the onset of this distortion tends to be rather abrupt. The nature of it is quite dissonant and it gradually shows up on dynamic peaks of hot recordings so it is elusive to track down. I find that the current trend of high output (0.5mV-1mV+) cartridges and the typical high ratio SUT's do not play well together and a 1:26 into your VPS 100 is not a good combination. This is not an issue with the SUT of the phono, it is an issue pairing the two with a cartridge with 1mV output. Feed it with a cartridge with a 0.25mV output and it would be a beautiful combination.
dave
All phono stages distort at frequencies first and the onset of this distortion tends to be rather abrupt. The nature of it is quite dissonant and it gradually shows up on dynamic peaks of hot recordings so it is elusive to track down. I find that the current trend of high output (0.5mV-1mV+) cartridges and the typical high ratio SUT's do not play well together and a 1:26 into your VPS 100 is not a good combination. This is not an issue with the SUT of the phono, it is an issue pairing the two with a cartridge with 1mV output. Feed it with a cartridge with a 0.25mV output and it would be a beautiful combination.
dave