Best cost no object tube phono

Reimarc, You need an in-home evaluation by another experienced and knowledgeable audiophile. Your story is much too complex to be addressed by anyone who hasn’t been in your listening room. I assume Dave Slagle knew you were using a cartridge with a 37 ohm internal resistance. Because pairing that with a 1:15 SUT is tricky. Of course, now you are presumably not using the SUT with the XP25. And your issue is not with the XP25 so much as it is that you are surprised the XP25 did not cure your pre-existing problem(s). Can you boil down your lengthy story to one or two sentences? That usually gets better results here. By the way, no one "needs" a $30,000 and up phono stage, like any of those you apologized for not being able to afford, in order to enjoy noise-free vinyl.

Good grief reimarc!

Might be helpful to start a new thread and keep the concern short and concise.

I lost interest in reading midway thru.

@reimarc

I’m surprised / impressed you able to balance the 16g LPS on a ProJect arm, but this is probably a case of too much cartridge for your deck.

I have an LPS in my collection and felt it wasn’t a great match for a SUT - I’ve tried several, all ratios. My phono stage is a VAC Renaissance (internal SUT), which makes all my OTHER cartridges sound by far their best (especially with a better matched outboard SUT), but the LPS is the odd man out here. I would indeed be looking at an ARC Reference if I were tying to optimally match the LPS. I can hear many things the LPS does well on my Graham Phantom and Hagerman Trumpet MC, and it’s great, but not quite up to the levels I can reach with other cartridges (including lower Benzes) on my VAC phono.

The lower Benz Ebony L and Zebrawood L (not the Ruby) models are far, far easier to work with because of their normal body weight and low impedance coils with a good output level. And they sound wonderful! They’re stellar with a SUT in the range of 15x (Zebra) - 30x (Ebony). In my system the Ebony and Zebra get lots of play, while the LPS simply rests waiting for a better phono match - which quite honestly may not be happening anytime soon (I don’t have any room for both an ARC and the VAC lol).

TLDR; you should have got a Zebrawood L with 0.4mV output and 12 ohm coils (not the ruby-plate Zebra, the iron-cross one)

Problem with an LPS into a 1:15 SUT is you end up with the cartridge seeing a 209ohm impedance. That could audibly attenuate treble, assuming a 47K ohm load resistance across the phono inputs, but Reimac was not complaining about that. The mismatch would not cause excessive hum or noise.

@lewm 

Yeah, no ideas on those 2 weird issues he's having. Just pointing out that his pairing of the LPS with other gear made me think "woah, I wouldn't do that".