Requesting recommendations for phono stage

@simao Well, it’s an old brand. Joe Rasmussen is the man behind JLTi, he’s an old partner of Allen Wright. Below is a part of the story from Joe’s website:

“I met the late Allen Wright (1947-2011) in 1975 at a Hi-Fi Show at The Pavilion in Sydney Showgrounds. The Pavilion has since been converted to a large movie studio where the Matrix movies were shot as well as the last two Star Wars movies. Allen was demoing stacked Quads and was the sound of the show by a country mile. This started a 36 year association that sadly ended in 2011.

Allen had identified a particular device used for video purposes, low noise, no internal compensation and no feedback required. As its noise specification was suitably low with low source impedance, a la Moving Coil cartridges, it was decided this could potentially make for an interesting Moving Coil Phono Stage. As Allen was busy with moving his business from Munich in Germany to Switzerland, I took it upon myself to do the actual development and produce working proto-types. Some of these were dispersed locally here in Australia and also a number of them went to the US, the first going to Roger S. Gordon, reviewer for Positive Feedback.

Eventually the production of the phono stage went to Switzerland using much fancier metalwork. It was also given the name JLTi Phono, where JLTi stands for Just Listen To It. On a cost versus performance, its audio quality is unmatched, and that is not just our opinion (old review here).”

** From myself I can only add that the latest JLTi is heavily upgraded mk5 version in a simpler box (for less money). For my version I asked Joe for a special mod to let me use optional loading not only for MC, but also for MM cartridges (Normally I use 47k Ohm or 100k Ohm for MM).

@chakster TBH, I tested the gold note and the LFD side by side in my system for about a week and with several listening buddies over, and the LFD simply destroyed the gold note no matter what settings I had the Gold note on. It's a fine preemplifier, and it has a lot of flexibility, but I was surprised at how inferior a performance it was compared to the LFD. But then again, that was just one side by side in one system, so obviously not applicable to everything.