Audio Research PH3 SE - Shelter 501 II compatibili

I thought that the PH3 was a moving magnet or high output moving coil phono preamp. If I am right about that, I don't think it has enough gain to run the Shelter. The Shelter has an output level of 0.5mv, and probably needs around 60db of gain to feed into a linestage preamp.

I'm using PH3SE with Shelter 901. I am using 500 ohm load after trying different loads. 100 ohm was way over damped in my system.

Thanks for the response guys, Nameci, how did you load the PH3SE to 500 ohm? ARC provided 30,60,100,200,800 ohm resistors, do I purchase 500 ohm from ARC? Also, what was the sonic differance between the 100 and 500 ohm?

I tried the PH3 with the Shelter 501 II, and felt that it did not have enough gain. Reading the specs it seemed like it might just marginally have enough gain, but it wasn't quite there in my system. I had a big improvement when I sold my PH3/LS8 Mk2 and bought a preamp designed for a MC cartridge.

Radio Shack should have 500 ohm resistors. I would recommend trying out different values and decide what works best on your system. Due to difference in internal wiring of the tonearm, listener preference, rest of the system balance, etc, not every system is same. Also keep in mind that lower the resistor loading, lower the output will be.

I am using Caddock resistors which I purchase seperately. I would recomend using either Vishay(little costly) or Caddock resistors, significantly better than stock resistor kit.

In case you feel that you need more gain, check with your preamp manufacture. For ARC gears, ARC provides simple modification(adding resistors) to change the gain up by 6dB. For example, most of the ARC preamp's 12dB single ended output can be changed to 18dB. If you are using balanced output, most of the ARC gears have 18dB w/o modification. If your preamp has less than 12dB, it would make more sense to either get a step up transformer.