Phono Preamps with "balls" ?

It could be a good alternative in your designs instead the out of production devices you were using.

We don't use any out of production devices. We have an internal design rule called the 20-year rule that prevents us from doing something like that.

The MAT12 is an excellent device; the gain and noise aspects are attractive. The distortion is not; we get lower distortion using a 12AT7.

@jcarr Apparently raul missed that comment about the MAT-12...

@jcarr

I agree that jfets are the way to go- although I like some of the aspects of the MAT-12s (which are bipolar, but a popular goto for phono front ends), getting them to actually sound right has been a problem so far. The jfets I want to use though aren't made anymore, and even then we had to sort through a pile of them just to find a pair that not only matched (since our circuits are fully differential) but were also quiet.


<snark>

maybe you can't or don't know how to do it.

</snark>

@rauliruegas 

Or maybe I'm just pickier than you. I'm not interested in getting it sound like a good stereo. It has to sound like real music. 

first that the phono-preamp has enough gain for the cartridge output level and be by preference a SS ( bipolars. ) design with no single tube inside, second that be an active high gain design

FWIW, it is a lot harder to build a solid state phono section that does not have RFI issues than it is to do the same thing with tubes. This is because semiconductors can act like diodes and thus rectify RF noise, thus making it audible.

I would add that phono stability (which includes but is not limited to RFI susceptibility) and overload margin are pretty important too, as such will mean that special loading considerations for LOMC cartridges are not needed (IOW, no loading resistors). The lack of loading resistors will allow the cartridge cantilever to track high frequencies better and with less distortion. A nice side benefit is far less ticks and pops as well as they are often a symptom of a phono section with poor overload margins and stability issues.

"balls" in this case means gusto, drive, dynamics and power.  these are definitely qualites that can be associated with phono preamps.  having owned many that were somewhat weak or anemic sounding I wanted to put a list together of some that are the contrary.  

With many phono sections the trick is to **not** use a cartridge that is at the lower limits of the phono section's gain limitations. Then almost any phono section will have what you are looking for.

Bonus: if the phono section is stable and has good overload margin, you will hear a significant reduction of ticks and pops, as many of those are caused by oscillation and RF overload caused by the inductance of the cartridge and the capacitance of the cable acting as a tuned RF circuit.

A way to tell that the phono section has stability problems is if you have to load your LOMC cartridge to get it to sound right (IOW the stock 47Kohms should be fine). The loading detunes the RF circuit and prevents it from injecting RFI into the preamp. But this comes at a price- the cantilever is stiffer, meaning that it will not track as easily. So a stable preamp is important!

Please some one of you or all can share why is that?

Sure- because most phono sections can play bass better than digital :)

Sheesh.

do you still think that R2R is the best analog reproduction medium?

No, I've never said that. LP is superior since it is lower distortion, lower noise and wider bandwidth. This is why LPs are used to release albums recorded on tape and not the other way 'round.

Raul, you are embarrassing yourself. The problem seems to be that you know nothing about how the industry makes recordings, and even less about the technologies involved. You should try running a recording/mastering operation sometime. When I first started cutting LPs, a good number of things I thought I 'knew' about the medium were dashed. One was how quiet lathe cuts are- they easily rival digital. The surface noise comes in during the pressing process (Acoustic Sounds with their pressing plant QRP has done a lot to solve that problem and now make the quietest pressings in the world). Another is how much dynamic range the medium has, and how low its distortion actually is (the cutter amps usually have about 10 times the power needed to completely toast the cutter head; the LP mastering system has the highest overhead of any audio process; it can't be overloaded like other processes can be). Additional noise and distortion can be caused by the pickup and equalizer (the latter can add ticks and pops that you might think are on the LP surface). But those problems are correctable. I suspect that you are making a common mistake of construing them with the media itself.

Here is my major objection to digital audio: I've gone to many concerts and also played in orchestra and bands. In those situations, if there is background noise like air conditioning, glasses clinking or people coughing, you can listen past them because they are not the music. Similarly, the artifacts of analog (hiss, ticks and pops) can be easily ignored by the brain as well, because those things sit in the speaker while the music is in 3 dimensions.

Digital OTOH imposes audible distortion (caused by aliasing and other problems, interpreted as brightness by the brain, which is why CDs still sound bright even if you have tone controls and turn the treble down all the way) that cannot be distinguished from the music.

Again, if digital is so much better, why are Best Buy and Target continuing to sell LPs while they are dumping CDs? Why are LP sales eclipsing digital downloads? One reason is digital streaming, but the other is that people that don't know anything about the technical bits still want LPs because they 'sound better'. Until you can solve that dilemma, the analog/digital floggings will continue.

Wow. Just wow. All Atma-Sphere amps have full power bandwidth to either 1 or 2 Hz, and my speakers go to 20Hz as well.

IOW, not knowing what I have in my living room, clearly you have no idea of what it is you are speaking. Your post contains a number of falsehoods and/or outright errors.

I can list them but is it pointless and does anyone care??

As I said the problem is not in the phono stage ( I mean the main problem. ) but the huge differences that exist in both proccess: recording and play where digital is way way different to how things goes with analog where almost all " thousands " of steps/stages where the signal pass through degrades the signal and you can't argue nothing about because are facts, no matter what. Example other that how the bass is recorded in digital:

@rauliruegas This is one of those areas that because you are not in the recording industry, there are things that you don't know, and you don't know that you don't know them.

Here is an example: When a project is mastered for CD or other digital release, quite often it is compressed. This is because CDs are played in cars. When the same project is mastered to LP, the compression is less or non-existent. This is because there is no expectation that the LP will be played in a car. You can talk all you want about dynamic range, but the fact is the industry doesn't care and they want it to work in a car.

Several other points- the LP has since the late 1950s bandwidth well past 30KHz. Playback apparatus has had that ability since the late 1960s. Our (older) mastering electronics are bandwidth limited to 42KHz but could go much higher without the filter at the output of the mastering amps. Digital has never had this sort of bandwidth.

Actually the EQ used by the LP system works pretty well. If we record a 20-20KHz sweep tone, we can play it back with no variation (within 1/2db) on our playback system that we use for testing of cuts, which consists of an old Technics SL-1200 with a Grado Gold, running into a Harmon Kardon HK430 receiver made in the 1970s. Your remonstrations notwithstanding, LP EQ is far more accurate than you make out; the real devil in the details is actually the master recording itself and how much EQ was applied to that before we ever see it.

So 'Nah' is simply 'what is'; right now the digital isn't out there to do the job. I have hopes that it will be and by all indications it is still improving. But you have to wonder why in the heck vinyl is so much easier to find these days (1992 was the year of least vinyl production, over a quarter of a century ago); if it isn't obvious, it is that as a prior art, the succeeding art failed to be better and the market knows it. That simple fact is really all anyone needs to know about this.

A CD with a top DAC ( 32bits/384 khz.) and good overall design outperforms any phono stage it does not matters the phono stage price/pedigree ( including yours. ) in the bass " management " and this is not because your unit or other units are not good designs because I know your design is a good one but it’s because the differences between a digital and LP recording technics.

Nah. I've heard the best digital out there. Sorry.

The recording microphones pick up all the music in stereo including the bass range but for the LP overall limitations the low bass comes not in stereo as when in the recording but in mono way when in digital comes as what were pick up by those recording session microphones, digital has no limitations about.

This statement is false. I run an LP mastering operation (Scully lathe, Westerex 3D cutterhead, modified Westerex 1700 electronics). It is true that out of phase bass is problematic for the LP (which only occurs in pop recordings; if recorded with two mics it does not happen). Problematic is one thing- impossible is another!

If you are lazy, you use the bass processing (and then the bass might be mono for a few milliseconds), but so far we've yet to need it. All you have to do is spend some time with the project (making tests of the problem area) to sort out how to master it (vary the groove depth and amplitude to see what works- a 3 db change is a significant change in modulation...) so you don't have to use processing even if the bass is out of phase.

My recommendation is to get an LP mastering lathe and find out for yourself- or listen to someone that has already gone down that path.

I've yet to hear a CD that plays better bass than my phono section...

I like to run balanced, as all phono cartridges are balanced sources, and that can reduce or eliminate the 'sound' that the tone arm cable might otherwise impart.