Dear @frozentundra : "
As a general rule...."
I own 5-6 SUTs and owned some others in the past. The ones I own are hard wired to not disturb the cartridge signal through the input/output connectors and are hard wired with 0.5m good IC cables.
My Phonolinepreamp is an active high gain design with separated/dedicated MC and MM circuit boards. Yes, the MC stage is better than the MM+SUT and how much better depends on the SUT I use.
My favorite SUT is this vintage one by Denon and note its really wide band windth frequency response that even today SUTs can't approach in the other side note that it's a really heavy unit with 12kg.:
https://www.denon.jp/ja-jp/museum/products/au1000.html
performs excellent and as a fact it's installed rigth now in my system.
Normally a phono stage with internal SUT are less expensive than a good SS active high gain phono stage that at the same time performs better too.
I could think that this today SUT by Audio Technica can works really fine in a good MM phono stage design:
https://www.audio-technica.com/cms/accessories/1211e0cd29d5d0aa/index.html
With SUTs as these ones that " softening " is really at minimum and we can't avoid it in a SUT. These kind of SUTs asks for top LOMC cartridge models.
But more important than if passive or active high gain phono stage is the quality of its design with main focus in the inverse RIAA eq. curve.
Everything is important in any design but exist different priority levels in the design characteristics.
R.
I own 5-6 SUTs and owned some others in the past. The ones I own are hard wired to not disturb the cartridge signal through the input/output connectors and are hard wired with 0.5m good IC cables.
My Phonolinepreamp is an active high gain design with separated/dedicated MC and MM circuit boards. Yes, the MC stage is better than the MM+SUT and how much better depends on the SUT I use.
My favorite SUT is this vintage one by Denon and note its really wide band windth frequency response that even today SUTs can't approach in the other side note that it's a really heavy unit with 12kg.:
https://www.denon.jp/ja-jp/museum/products/au1000.html
performs excellent and as a fact it's installed rigth now in my system.
Normally a phono stage with internal SUT are less expensive than a good SS active high gain phono stage that at the same time performs better too.
I could think that this today SUT by Audio Technica can works really fine in a good MM phono stage design:
https://www.audio-technica.com/cms/accessories/1211e0cd29d5d0aa/index.html
With SUTs as these ones that " softening " is really at minimum and we can't avoid it in a SUT. These kind of SUTs asks for top LOMC cartridge models.
But more important than if passive or active high gain phono stage is the quality of its design with main focus in the inverse RIAA eq. curve.
Everything is important in any design but exist different priority levels in the design characteristics.
R.