Would increasing the gain in the amp give more weight to the sound? Any negatives?


I have an integrated amp with passive preamp section and I feel that the sound is not full-bodied enough. The separate phono stage has 42db of gain and I use MM cartridge. When I play cassette deck, the sound is just right in this respect.
I talked to the designer, and he said that increasing the gain is theoretically possible, though time consuming.
And if I do want to increase the gain - by how much? The amp is 120 watt/ch/8ohm, speakers are 89db efficient, 8ohm.
inna
The Goldring 1042 has a recommended load capacitance of 150 to 200 pf. Unless you are using a phono cable having particularly low capacitance, I would guess that the 1.5 meter cable probably has a capacitance in the area of 150 or perhaps even 200 pf, which means that together with the 200 pf input capacitance of the phono stage the cartridge is probably seeing close to twice the recommended load capacitance. So that could very possibly be a significant contributor to the problem.  On the other hand, though, I note that you indicated that recordings made from records sound fine.

Regarding the reason for the 10,000 pf input capacitance in LOMC mode, as I said it was presumably necessitated by something about the particular design. To hazard a very speculative guess, perhaps the circuitry is particularly sensitive to radio frequency energy, and perhaps a 10,000 pf capacitor was therefore placed at the input to provide a very heavy load at RF frequencies (the impedance of a capacitor decreases as frequency increases, and hence the loading it presents becomes heavier as frequency increases), that would filter out any such energy that might be generated by the cartridge (LOMCs have bandwidths extending up into the RF region) or that may be picked up from some other source.

Regards,
-- Al

Al, this is interesting. I have no idea of the capacitance of the Nottingham arm's wiring. Assuming that you are right that this does contribute to what I am experiencing, how would you explain the fact that when running the phono thru the deck I don't have such a problem, I only got slight drop in resolution and soundstage. And it's not only the deck, it's also an additional cable, by the way. Cables from both phono and deck are Purist Audio.
The deck maybe 47k and loading the phono stage differently to the 10k of the Redgum.

Cheers George