Hi, your post caught my attention. I have a modded Thorens TD 160 with a Grado cartridge. I just went from a low powered single ended tube system to a high powered (180 wpc ) tube system. Unfortunately my Rogue Hera pre lacks a phono stage so I’ll be shopping for a phono stage. But what I wanted to add is that I just had my M-180 monos rebuilt to “ Dark “ status. In doing so there’s a tube upgrade and they each came back with new production Tung Sol gold pin 5751’s in place of the usual 12AX7’s. While doing some break in time I swapped the Tung Sols for a curve trace matched pair of NOS Telefunken smooth plates that are considerably more expensive. In doing so I too came to the realization of how good those new production Tung Sol’s are and put them back in. On my pre I have a gain knob with 5 level settings and found myself reducing the gain with the Telefunkens ( digital only at this point ). My thought for you is if you experiment with mats and continue to have this issue the 5751’s are a compatible tube with a lower Mu factor. Plus they lower the noise floor Vs 12AX7’s. So maybe my off topic ramble will give you some food for thought if the mat issue continues. I’ll be following your thread as I need to get a phono stage and have a similar TT. Regards , Mike B.
Changed tubes & interconnects, now listening to platter mats?!
I recently upgraded the interconnect and output tubes on my phono pre and suddenly platter mat height and material seem to make a huge difference. I have a modest analog setup and for many years I was using Genalex Gold Lion 12AX7 output tubes and was quite happy. I noticed recently after changing in new interconnects to both my digital and analog front ends that my records were not sounding as good as files.
Since my tubes were 6 years old I suspected they had gone around the bend, and sure enough, putting in the stock tubes that came with the preamp made an immediate improvement in the immediacy of the sound, if a little lacking in soundstage width and depth. So in the spirit of trying something new, I got a pair of matched Tung-Sol Gold Pin tubes to try out and have been kinda floored by the result.
After a 100 hours the detail retrieval and slam is mind blowing. The interesting thing is that I have never heard my system so sensitive to both platter mat height/VTA and material. I have a number of different mats on hand and have been experimenting with different ones and combinations. I have landed some place very different than I started, but am very happy.
Has anything like this happened to you with a simple change in output tubes made your system more sensitive to the mat material used on your table?
kn
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Interesting comments, thanks. Yeah, these Tung-Sol Gold Pin tubes are for real. I landed on a placing a Pro-Ject cork mat on the TD150mkII aluminum platter with an acrylic mat on top of that. Sounds great with the Tung-Sol tubes and slightly beat out the stock rubber mat for me. With the Gold Lion tubes, I liked the acrylic mat underneath a felt mat. Go figure. Using two mats allows me to remove one for 180-200g records and roughly preserve optimal VTA. Brass platter - wow! It would match the brass Mapleshade points under my TD150!! kn |
@buellrider97 I just reread your post and want to say I don’t haves issues with platter mats now necessarily, just that the higher resolution tubes and interconnects are making the differences between different mats in my collection much, much more obvious. I have messed around with different mats and VTA settings previously and noticed some differences with my vintage TD150, but the differences I am noticing now are really quite startling. As for the 5751 tubes versus the 12AX7 tubes for my phono pre - I’d have to look into that further. The 12AX7 Tung-sol’s are dead quite in my system as is. |
- 13 posts total