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
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.
@lewm  : every body know about the today extremely humble MM Audio Technica AT-95E ( 49.00 ) where its inductance is 400mH that inside the AT load capacitance specs its resonance frequency is over 20khz.

This is my last post about load capacitance.

R.
The MP is Moving Permalloy, not exactly Moving Magnet
Find the difference

Here is J.Carr comment about MP:

"The operating principle would be that of a moving iron but with increased sensitivity, which could be used alternatively to increase output, reduce moving mass, or decrease inductance. "   






Nagaoka makes a pretty good cartridge especially for the money. You buy one, you screw it up into your tonearm, set your phono stage up right and enjoy the tunes. It has nothing to do with stroking one's ego discussing issues that have very little relevance to 90% of us. Moving iron, moving permalloy, moving magnet. They are all capable of sounding perfectly fine and much more alike than not.
The OP wanted to know if he could reduce the noise in his vinyl playback system. Phono stage overload, loading and lower capacitance cables have been mentioned. Does anyone have other ideas for emilm to try?