Problem with phono stage


Hello Fellow Audiogoners,

I need help with my Phono stage. It is Lehman Audio Black Cube from Germany.  It was recommended from Simao, a very respected Audiogon member who helped me a lot when I was building my stereo. It costs 450$ brand new which I bought used from this site. Michael Fremer considers it one of the best steals in phono stages. I get a little bit better detail and bass extension BUT it also much noisier. I can hear the pops and any other noises  on the records much more then with the phono stage of my Arcam FMJ 28 which turned out to be a surprisingly good one considering it is an integrated one.
I also switched the cables but the noise is still there.
Is this a common problem with added phono stages as opposed to integrated ones or something is wrong with my phono and needs to be checked.

All help will be greatly appreciated.
Emil


emilm
with all due respect to the knowledgeable parties here, one has to see the manufacturer as the last word in facts about the cartridge in question...

https://www.turntableneedles.com/assets/images/productimages/nagaoka_MP_series.pdf

page down half way in this users manual... says right there... IM style, as Raul says - retailers can say MM on their sites as a shorthand/general type (vs. low output MC, which is the key differentiation)

can we go back to helping the OP now? this back and forth is not helping him much...

that MM thread started by Raul was and is a seminal thread for those wanting to learn... not an easy read, as you would expect, but much much info and knowledge in there... for those who really want to master the subject
As I carefully noted, I am going on information obtained from a few internet websites, one of which was LP Gear. As I have learned not to trust LP Gear for accurate information on cartridges they sell, I verified the information on another site. If I am nevertheless incorrect, good for you. I will do some more searching to verify your claim. By the way, the Vinyl Engine page you quote says the output is 5mV, as mentioned by others here on this thread. I will have to sign on to VE in order to view the owners manual, but 5mV is rather high output for any MI in my experience; I suppose it’s possible. Accessing the actual owners manual regarding the transduction method will require me to sign in on VE. I’ll get back to you. I guess the point I was really trying to make by inference is that your insults directed toward Atma-sphere are uncalled for. If you think he (and now I) erred, then just say so. There is just no need for your vitriole.
EDIT. OK, I just found the owners manual.  You are correct.  IM type.  Mea culpa. Nowhere do I find a quote for the actual inductance.  Do you know it?
https://www.vinylengine.com/turntable_forum/viewtopic.php?t=72159&start=15https://forums.stevehoffman.tv/threads/nagaoka-mp110-cartridge-loading.364498/https://www.vinylengine.com/turntable_forum/viewtopic.php?t=116237
Info at the above sites might help the OP to think about capacitance for the MP110.  In searching, I also found one other site where the cartridge is said to be an MM type, but I tend to agree with the owners manual, per Raul.  However, whether MM or IM, the inductance of this cartridge is quite high, higher even than a typical MM.  In 3 instances I found inductance quoted as 600mH or more than 800mH.  Thus, whether it is an MM or an MI type, it is even more subject to capacitance (and load R) than is the typical MM.  So Atma-sphere's analysis of where the resonant peak might fall and effect the audio band is reasonable and even conservative, regardless of the transduction method.

The actual inductance is not listed on the Nagaoka website. Naturally I looked there first, but since Raul suggested the value first, I used his numbers (600mH) but sensing that was probably too high gave him the benefit of the doubt and went with 500mH. The thing is here that in order to generate 5mV, you're going to have an associated inductance that is going to have to be in that area, generally speaking so its a safe value to assume, and it gave Raul the benefit of the doubt.

Now Raul made some other comments that were so ridiculous that I wondered if they were even worth addressing. But since there are many who might read this that don't have an engineering background, I probably should address at least one:
October 16 of 2020 year and are you talking in a high end analog forum of op-amps? really? when several years ago no one use op-amps in any decent today SS electronics: decent unit design.
This statement is all at once laughable, ridiculous and patently false. To those that don't know, 'opamp' is a reduction of the phrase 'operational amplifier' and refers to a circuit that has exceptional if not nearly infinite gain- so much in fact that in order to operate linearly it has to employ feedback. Feedback is the act of taking a signal at the output of a circuit and sending it back in a reduced form to the input to act as a correction voltage. In this way distortion is reduced. Opamps are commonly available in small plastic packages with 8 pins containing a pair of opamp circuits. They have been in use in audio since the late 1960s and have seen dramatic performance improvements over the succeeding decades and make no mistake, are very much in use in high end audio today in preamps, DACs, tape machines, power amplifiers, tuners and so on. They are used in servo circuits (including servo-controlled subwoofers), power supply regulators and of course as gain blocks in audio circuits. 


With regards to phono sections, there's a kind of phono section made by a variety of companies, Krell, 47 Labs and so on that are current rather than voltage amplifiers; these phono sections (which get nice reviews) absolutely *have* to use opamps in order to work- they are intrinsic in the design and this is no secret. But you can google this stuff easily enough, by googling almost any solid state preamp with a phono section, look for the interior shots (try John Curl's Blowtorch preamp) and the opamps are clearly visible in the photos.


But there is a particular phono preamp with which Raul claims to have some association, one which he claims is the best (its obvious at this point he was not part of the design team) and it too employs opamps! Res ispa loquteur...
Speaking of capacitance, phono cable single ended and balanced, will capacitance of the cable affect the same on either case?

@luisma31   Yes.



Dear @lewm : Nagaoka today ( the OP cartridge. ) does not gives any load capacitance value in its specs.


""" analysis of where the resonant peak might fall and effect the audio band ... "

the true analysis belongs to Hagerman and I don't know before him.

In the MM thread that calculator was showed for the first time in this forum and not for me ( I think. ). Go there and you will find out several posts about capacitance and load impedances other than 47k.

Enough, jjss has reason: we have to help the OP and not post information that increment the mix-up to him.

 Give him a real and true advise other than capacitance issue to help him, just do it.

R.

Btw, no insults per sé, read my post here:

https://forum.audiogon.com/discussions/problem-with-phono-stage/post?postid=2037860#2037860

and he follows posting the same " tale ". Good that you and mijo support him. As him both of you even worst because are followers.