Phono stage for Denon DL103R

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?

I put the DL-103 on the JMW arm and conducted the resonance test on the High-Fi News Test LP. I obtained the following results: 9-11 hz on the lateral, and 10-11hz on the vertical. This seems to be within the acceptable range. The DLl-103R has different specs...More homework.

The Denon 103R has the same compliance as the straight 103 (the only difference being the 6 nines copper windings and slightly lower output impedance) so resonance test results should be the same.