Fidelity Research FR-64x

@chakster You go ahead and enjoy it! I'll just sit back and lol.

Sony PUA-7 does not fit to any alignments on my Feickert, so they use a different alignment for this tonearm. It is not Stevenson, Baerwald or Lofgren. If it was Stevenson then it must be dead on on Feickert’s Stevenson (with correct pivot to spindle distance), but it’s not. You know why? Because Sony protractor is different. I have the original one, not a printed copy or something. I know what i’m talking about, you’d better check it yourself in reality.

@invictus005 

You remind me a soft of the dudes Nelson Pass is talking about, here is a quote: 

So here we are in the New Millennium, and thanks to Tom Holman and THX we’ve got lots of gain in our electronics. More gain than some of us need or want. At least 10 db more.

Think of it this way: If you are running your volume control down around 9 o’clock, you are actually throwing away signal level so that a subsequent gain stage can make it back up.

Routinely DIYers opt to make themselves a “passive preamp” - just an input selector and a volume control.

What could be better? Hardly any noise or distortion added by these simple passive parts. No feedback, no worrying about what type of capacitors – just musical perfection.

And yet there are guys out there who don’t care for the result. “It sucks the life out of the music”, is a commonly heard refrain (really - I’m being serious here!). Maybe they are reacting psychologically to the need to turn the volume control up compared to an active preamp.

I suppose if I had to floor the accelerator to drive 55 mph, maybe I’d think the life was being sucked out of my driving. Then again, maybe I like 55. Nice and safe, good gas mileage…

Is impedance matching an issue? Passive volume controls do have to make a trade-off between input impedance and output impedance. If the input impedance is high, making the input to the volume control easy for the source to drive, then the output impedance is also high, possibly creating difficulty with the input impedance of the power amplifier. And vice versa: If your amplifier prefers low source impedance, then your signal source might have to look at low impedance in the volume control.... 

Because you have a different P2S mount distance. Try this: forgeret about the Sony protrcator and mount the PUA 7 at 235mm from the spindle and your  Feickert protractor will works with any alignment you want.

R.

@chakster Nelson doesn't sell passive preamps nor makes them. He only sells active preamps. B1 buffer was meant for DIY amateurs.

People who actually design circuits laugh at passive preamps. If this is something you want to use, go ahead. But you are seriously ruining any resemblance of good sound. And I honestly cannot take your opinion seriously on anything else.