Can good IC's be used instead of dedicated phono's

You can use any cable at all for starters. Then work backward. If you have noise with an unshielded cable, then you need a shield. If you have hum, you need to play with grounding. If you have high frequency loss or gain, you need to play with capacitance. Etc.

Your XLO cables are a perfectly good place to start, if your tt has RCA output jacks, as someone else noted. If the phono cable goes direct into the base of the tonearm, then you probably need a cable with a female DIN plug at that end; one DIN plug carries signal for both channels and grounds.

By the way, shielding adds capacitance.

By the way, shielding adds capacitance.

Although, as is usually the case in audio, there are a multitude of variables that affect the bottom line of a given parameter. Blue Jeans LC-1, for example, even though it is NOT specifically intended for phono applications, and even though it is heavily shielded, and even though its cost is very low, has an extremely low capacitance of 12.2 pf/ft.

Best regards,
-- Al

Al, But I would guess that the capacitance would be even lower if there were no shield. Which was my point, altho I probably should have been more explicit. Geometry is the major determinant of the IC capacitance, but shielding adds to it. I think that is accurate, but I am open to enlightenment if not.

Hi Lew,

We're both right, as I see it. But the basic underlying point I wanted to convey in my response is that if low capacitance is required for a particular application, focus should not be placed exclusively or even primarily on unshielded designs.

Blue Jeans LC-1, btw, is a coaxial cable, with the shield (actually a double shield) serving as the return conductor. So comparison with an unshielded cable that is otherwise similar would not be meaningful or possible, as such a cable would not work. On the other hand, I agree that a cable design having both the signal and the return conductors within a shield, when compared with an otherwise identical cable having no shield, would have higher capacitance.

Best regards,
-- Al

If you use a separate ground wire for your phono interconnect, be sure to try different types of wire for the ground. I recently discovered by accident that the type of ground wire made a significant difference sonically. In my case, the ground wire runs from my SUT box to the phono preamp. All it does at the SUT box end is ground the aluminum chassis in which the transformers are mounted. It is not electrically connected to the transformers or any other part of the audio signal path, yet it makes a major difference. Go figure.