Phono stage for Denon DL103R

To bring some of my perspective in here, in particular with respect to Tswhitsel's comments:

Tswhitsel is completely correct to point out the problems of matching a very lightweight arm like the JMW9 to low compliance cartridges like the Denon. Following the same arguments, I would have expected the Denon to be a very bad match to the JMW9 arm. Nevertheless, I tried it, since I was curious about the Scout and only had a Denon DL103R around. It turns out it wasn't such a bad match at all. I would even go as far as saying that the JMW9 worked better with the DL103R than on my previous Rega derivative arms.

Some details about the Denon compiance: I measured the resonance frequency for the Denon DL103/JMW9/3g headshell weight and got a resonance somewhere between 9-10Hz. Removing the additional weight the resonance lies around 10-11, which is still a very acceptable value.

As for unipivot design with low compliance cartridges (an excerpt from the Van den Hul web page):

Q: I have a unipivot arm from the USA. What sort of cartridge should I buy ?

A: A cartridge with a lower compliance to avoid the well known Olympic game: Groove jumping. When you order a cartridge from our company, please tell your dealer that you need a cartridge for this type of arm. It helps to reduce all kinds of problems.

As a result Van den Hul's comments would suggest exactly the opposite: To mate a unipivot arm with something like the Denon!

Soundwise the Denon is still my favorite for the Scout I have around right now…just my own experience. :)

Rene

A couple of good sources for resonance calculations and a good discussion of comliance vs. effective arm mass:

Great Primer on Arm/Cartridge matching

Resonance Calculator

Van den Hul FAQ

Enjoy!

Flyfisher-I'll reiterate. A Denon 103/103r will be fine with your jmw 9 arm. If you are at all concerned about the compliance issue, VPI sells a headshell weight for (I believe) 15.00, but I honestly don't think you'll need it. This is from my own experience, and from many others (see Vinyl Asylum)

As far as your phono stage, you'll need to load this cart at +/- 100 ohms, and have approx. 60db of gain. Don't know enough about your phono stage to comment on those parameters.....

The DL103 range of carts work well with medium mass arms as it is not quite the low compliance cart folks think it is. Some doubt exists as to the way Denon measured the cart and when measured by a number of posters on the Vinyl Asylum the compliance number is found to be in the 10-15 x 6 cm/dyne range.

Another misconception is that low compliance carts don't work on unipivots, but like Restock I have tried the combination and if anything I found the contrary to be true.

As for the gain, the DL103 cart seem to like step up transformers. Use a step-up and plug it into your MC inputs. Cinemag makes step-ups that work well with DL103's that is not very expensive.

Regards
Paul

I was able to contact Musical Fidelity and I was given the following information: The gain on the XLPSv3 is 52db MM and 68db MC. Given this info, will the cartridges in question work well with the phono preamp?