Science & Sound, Tube or Solid State Phono?

Dear Dgad: +++++ " Does the choice depend on the cartridge in use? " +++++

IMHO a full well designed Phonolinepreamp is a design for any cartridge , its quality performance depended only on its own good thinking design and its design execution not with which cartridge is used. From my point of view a Phonolinepreamp must be a Universal-use one it does not matter MC/MM type cartridge, output cartridge level or anything else.

Regards and enjoy the music.
Raul.

Well, as always, YMMV. I have joined Lloyd Walker's camp that for LOMC cartridges, SS is the best bet. I am a tube fan, I do use a tube line stage and a tube amplifier, but I do agree with Lloyd, that for very small voltages, SS may be a more stable solution. FWIW, my cartridge outputs 0.24 mV.

Cheers,
John

Nick Doshi does the same for his MC gain stage, SS that is. From what I understand it is not easy to do, but when done right it works very well. The rest is all tubes.

I owned a phonostage once that did all of the gain stages in tubes. No SS, no transformers. Significantly more noisey. It lacked finese and other things as well.

I agree with Raul, the choice in cartridge shouldn't matter if the phonostage is done correctly.

I recently converted the first gain stage of my Atma-Sphere MP-1 MkII to SS, thanks to Lewm and Allen Wright, who posts a schematic of his hybrid phono stage for DIYers. With a medium-output Helikon this was a significant improvement over the stock all-tube design. S/N is way up, as is bass control & dynamics, without any apparent loss of favorable tube-like qualities in treble and midrange. On any day I would consider a high-gain SS or hybrid design like this preferable to a step-up transformer. (I've tried both Cinemag & Jensen step-ups.) My understanding, however, is that the all-tube MkIII version of the MP-1 is quieter than earlier versions.

Two other examples of very fine all tube designs suitable for low output carts would be the Aesthetix Io and the Wavestream Kintetics. The main challenge with all tube designs as intimated above is getting high gain with low noise. Another typical issue is that SS tends to have better low bass clarity but this is more of an issue with amplifiers than preamps.

What we found with the MkIII was that proper constant current sources with differential amplification is the way to get tubes to be really quiet. The difference is quite noticeable.

It also helps to have quiet tubes! Most NOS tubes these days are far too noisy to be used for low output MC.

It's worth reiterating the obvious that selecting "Super Low Noise" tubes for the front end of a phono stage is a no brainer. There are plenty of on-line services that provide such, for a price. Do not assume that your manufacturer of choice has already done so unless they insist that they have. IME, most manufacturers assume that the end user will go the extra mile of exotic tubes, if they want to, on their own nickel.