What phono pre am I looking for?


It needs to be quiet, fast, dynamic and not cost an arm and a leg, $1500? Plays nice with a VPI/dynavector 20x2 low without a sut. I listen and enjoy most everything but, the British Invasion, Willie Nelson, Gillian Welch and jazz take the cake. I have tubes, an LTA pre, decware set amp and omega speakers. 
The new channel islands peq-1 looks mighty fine and dusty uses the 20x2 as his personal cart, which can't be bad?  New or used no problem. 

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Showing 2 responses by lewm

If one wants to stick with solid state, and if one has money to spend, and since the OP wants at least two phono inputs, I highly recommend the DS Audio phono stages.  I have heard them both in my house, in my system, and they are among the rare SS phono stages that could compete with my Atma-sphere MP1, albeit I still preferred the MP1 by a slight margin. But the great thing about the TOTL DSA phono stage (about $10,000, I think) is that it has THREE completely independent phono circuits, so you can set gain, load, capacitance, etc, independently for each of the 3 stages, and there's no worries about colorations or signal loss due to the interposition of switches in the phono signal path.  The designer is a very nice guy, too, and he seems to have thought of every eventuality in implementing a 3-cartridge/3-tonearm set-up.  The less expensive version of two models I heard is possibly only a single phono stage but has all the virtues of its big brother.
JLTi is probably a very nice phono stage for the money, but let's not pretend that it competes with really good phono stages in higher price brackets.  For Allen Wright and Joe Rasmussen, it was never their top of the line product.  AW preferred his tubed units, which of course cost much more money.  This is no insult to Chakster or the JLTi; I'm just keeping it real.  If you're on a budget in that price range, JLTi is probably a contender.  Phono stages that cost more are not necessarily "over-priced" by comparison.  I think AW's fully balanced RTP3C cost on the order of $10,000, and it was that good, by all accounts.  Still, I admire your enthusiasm, Chak.