Turntable - The Next Step

If you’re gun-shy about MC cartridges, it may be because you’ve operated one with a wall wart. I did this with a Project Phono Box RS and it was terribly noisy. I bought an LPS for it and this did help overall quietness with MM cartridges but I still had loud hum with MC types.

I heard about the Hagerman Trumpet MC and its ability to stay quiet with a wall wart as part of its novel power supply design. Well it is pretty damn quiet. More importantly it sounded very sweet and musical.

This allowed me to finally use my AT33PTGII that was relegated to the drawer for almost a year. Finally hearing what a good MC can do is enlightening. I’m coming from years of commitment to the excellent VM740ML and VM750SH. Having a dedicated MC phono preamp is worth while. Keep your existing phono preamp for MM but consider a good MC specific unit and you may convert to the detail retrieval MC carts can offer.

I've found that MC carts are so sensitive that dust the cantilever picks up from normal use will slightly deaden the response. I use a soft stylus brush to gently clean the stylus and cantilever every few records. VTA/VTF setup is also very important. Buying a 4.5mm mat for my setup helped immensely. But once you understand how much more influential these little details are for MCs, you may never go back to MM. 

Just buy yourself $1000 worth of new albums and skip all of the woulda shoulda coulda.

@gnoworyta , Get a cookie jar and keep saving. What you intend on spending is not enough to achieve a significant improvement, one that you would notice. Rough estimate is you would have to save $6000 to do the job right. This is for the turntable, tonearm and cartridge. There are a million ways to break this up and each one of us is going to have a different opinion, a confusing mess. Learn what features improve the performance of a turntable. Watch this video. There is one big mistake in this video. It undercuts the importance of anti skating which no serious audiophile would do without. 

Go one step further with a moving coil and add a SUT. I’m using a Jensen mc2rr-L with a Hana EL into the moving magnet input of my phono preamp in another set up. Sounds fantastic.

Another option for an upgrade to turntable would be to look into an Avid turntable. They are big on the concept of the turntable matters more to the sound than the cartridge used. If you look at a lot of turntables that are of significant cost, you will notice that they provide with the turntable a relatively low cost, but high quality cartridge. For instance, on the Avid Ingenium plug and play, they provide a premounted unbranded moving magnet cartridge, actually a Rega Carbon with no markings. Also look at what comes installed on the high buck Vertere DG-1....its a rebadged Audio-Technica AT-VM520EB, I think 100 bucks. Some will say we'll that's because they don't want to provide a very expensive cartridge with the turntable package, as they assume the end user will just replace it.....I say bull crap....they provide the lower tier cartridge because they listened to the end result and found it to do all things necessary to provide great sound. In other words, don't waste your money buying some high dollar cartridge. 

I own the above mentioned Avid Ingenium plug and play and I can attest that it has an outstanding build quality for the money spent. 

@andyhifiman  which Clearaudio...?