Tube Preamp Paired with Tube Phono Stage?

I'm also looking at the Chinook as a potential upgrade to my current phono stage. It's got everything I'm looking for, except one thing: a relatively low gain of 60 dB for MC. This would suggest that it's not adequate for MC cartridges with an output below 0.5 mV, which eliminates a lot of great cartridges. This is almost as frustrating as John Curl's JC-3 phono preamp offering only one impedance setting of 100 Ohms for MC. That one I'll never understand.

Dear Actusreus, If what you say is true about the JC3 load resistor for MC, I share your chagrin, but one might always open the chassis, find said 100R load resistor, remove it, and replace it with a resistor of the desired value. I do agree that the task is tedious, if one wants to play with a variety of cartridges and/or experiment with different load values.

This is almost as frustrating as John Curl's JC-3 phono preamp offering only one impedance setting of 100 Ohms for MC. That one I'll never understand.

The reason is if the preamp is resistant to RF at its input, the load on the LOMC is not critical. Its only there to reduce RF caused by the inductance of the cartridge interacting with the capacitance of the interconnect cable, which can form a tuned RF circuit. The resistor destroys the 'Q' of the circuit. IOW if the preamp works right, the value of the resistor is not important since it only works at RF frequencies.

This says to me that Mr. Curl's preamp must be pretty resistant to RF issues.

Actusreus, I would think that 60 db of gain from a phono stage would be enough for any cartridge, unless possibly if you are considering running through a passive controller instead of an active preamp. Most will run the Chinook through an active line stage preamp (as the OP is here) which will add more than enough gain for any cartridge.

If your linestage has reasonable gain, 60 db of phonostage gain may be enough for some pretty low output cartridges. My phonostage has 60 db of gain, my linestage delivers 13 db of gain, and I use the combination with a .30 mV cartridge with no noise or other problems.

I also agree that a fixed loading of 100 ohms is not that big of a problem--that will work with a vast majority of MC cartridges. Linn did the same thing with its Linto phonostage (fixed at 125 ohms), claiming that the switches to allow for more options would degrade the sound while 125 ohms would work with most cartridges.