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Category: Vinyl preamps
My Beautiful Michell Gyro SE
I bought my Gyro SE (SE for ‘Spider Edition) in 2016, having read about Michell turntables on and off for more than 20 years. While working in Taiwan between 2011 and 2015, I visited a local Audio shop in Tianmu, Taipei where a full Gyrodec was on display. It was a huge piece of machinery…
Hifisonix Accurate Inverse RIAA Network
The diagram above summarizes the interaction of the cutting head response (purple) and the playback EQ (red) which produces the final flat response (green). Note that the cutting head and the phono pickup (cartridge) are velocity transducers and therefore the cartridge output rises at 20 dB/decade if the record groove is cut at constant amplitude.…
So Just How Quiet is Your Phono Stage?
You may be in for a surprise: actually not that quiet! The reason of course is that the cartridge inductance and resistance dominate the noise in any decent phono amp. To get the best in terms of noise performance, you really need to keep the input referred noise voltage and noise current to a minimum.…
RIAA Equalizer Amplifier Design
This article explores the fundamental’s of phono amplifier design, culminating in a few practical designs. Special emphasis is placed on overload margins (critical if you want good sonics from your EQ amp), driving the EQ network adequately and noise. RIAA Equalization Amplifiers V2.0 Below is the RIAA Calculator Excel spread sheet. Please read the article above,…
MC Head Amp Circuit Compendium
Here is the new updated moving coil head amp designs compendium – updated 31 July 2019. The first file is a PDF compendium of about 28 different circuits with noise, distortion and current consumption details. All the LTspice sim files are zipped in the second file. What is immediately apparent from this is that having…
Technical Requirements of Phono Preamplifiers by Tomlinson Holman
The two articles below were written in the 1970’s, nearly a decade before the arrival of the CD and the ‘perfect sound forever’ claim made by Philips. There was a lot of focus on phono amplifier performance at the time which it could be argued was triggered by the arrival of very high performance turntables…
Richard Lee’s Ultra-Low Noise MC Head Amp
This design was a development of Marshall Leach’s MC head-amp from the 1970’s and to my knowledge, Richard Lee’s implementation presented here has not been bested in terms of noise – about 280pV/rt Hz in a well implemented exemplar other than in the Hifisonix X-Altra MC/MM Phono Preamplifier. Importantly, it requires only about 12mA current…
Disc Recording Equalization Demystified by Gary A. Gallo
Pictured: A Neumann Cutting Lathe used to make the record master. Picture courtesy of Bakery Mastering This is one of the best non-mathematical introductions to the RIAA disc recording playback chain written. Gallo worked at the Crane School of Music in New York for 30 years as an audio engineer, where he also received a…