Vinyl foibles

@faustuss

Isn't capacitance part of the impedance?  The other two components of impedance being resistance and inductance....

@mylogic 2?

@richardbrand 

@audio-b-dog 

"Isn't capacitance part of the impedance?  The other two components of impedance being resistance and inductance...."

Good morning, Richard,

I just looked at the manual for audio-b-dog's AR phono stage and he should look at it as well. This phono stage has a fixed gain of 57.5dB for MM and MC and a fixed capacitance as well. Since I can't find a spec for it, I would assume AR chose 150pf for MM and MC as I believe most manufacturers would for the bulk of the cartridges a-b-dog would be using. The phono stage does have 5 impedance settings however, one of 47K for MMs and four more for MCs. He should be using the 100-ohm setting that VPI recommends for their Shyla cartridge, sit tight and let his ears settle into the sound AR and VPI intended or maybe the Sonus Faber's are just too sweet in tonal balance for his preferences.

@richardbrand ”@mylogic2?”

l think you are not tracking right.

Theres only one of me.

VPI recommends a MINIMUM resistive load of 100 ohms. So any value at or above 100 is fair game. The capacitance of the AR phono inputs ought to be available in the owners manual or on line. But don’t forget also that cable capacitance adds to input capacitance and that the gain device, tube or solid state, adds further capacitance. So if AR does say their phono inputs have 150pf capacitance, you’d like to know whether they include the inherent input C of the gain stage. RB is correct; impedance is the frequency dependent sum of R, C, and L.

@lewm 

Sorry if I confused anybody by talking about my old phono preamp and my new one. The ARC PH-7 was my old one. It had an unchangeable capacitance of 200. The Shyla sounded gread with an impedence of 200. 

Now to my new phono preamp. It is the Pass Labs XP-25 and it does have a capacitance setting I can play with. I hear a difference between all the settings. I have set it to 100, 200, and 320. The 200 setting sounds right with most albums, but when an album makes my Olympica Nova tweeters sound shrill, I have been changing the capacitance to 320. 

What I have read about capacitance in regards to MM cartridges is that increasing it will increase treble balance. I think that my stereo is just pretty revealing at this point, and I can hear things with the Pass Labs Preamps that I didn't hear with the ARC PH-7. 

BTW, I am not an electronics guy, so I just go by ear. All the electronics are kind of lost on me. I tried asking chatgbt and its answer was so filled with electronics formulas, it totally lost me. It says, however, that the treble balance in comparison to the midrange is changes with capacitance and the treble appears harsher when the capacitance is lower.because the mids become recessed.