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Phono Stage - The great analog tragedy

In the world of analog playback, there is an interesting observation. There has been tremendous innovation in the field of 
Turntable - Direct, Idler, Belt
Cartridge - MM, MC, MI
Tonearm - Gimbal, Unipivot, Linear Tracking

For all of the above designs we find some of the best reference components designed in the 50s, 60s, 70s and 80s. Most of the modern products are inspired from these extraordinary products of the past. But when it comes to phono stage, there is hardly any "reference component" from that era. They just standardized RIAA curve for sanity and left it. Manufacturers made large preamps and amps and allocated a puny 5% space for a small phono circuit even in their reference models, like a necessary evil. They didn’t bother about making it better. 

The result? It came down to the modern designers post 2000 after vinyl resurgence to come up with serious phono stages for high end systems. Unfortunately they don’t have any past reference grade designs to copy or get inspired from. Effectively, just like DACs, reference phono stages is also an evolving concept, and we don’t have too many choices when we want a really good one which is high-res and natural sounding. Very few in the world have figured out a proper high end design so far. And most of the decent ones have been designed in the past couple of decades. The best of the breed are probably yet to come.  

It is a tragedy that our legendary audio engineers from the golden era didn’t focus on the most sensitive and impactful component, "the phono stage"

pani
lewm
13,777 posts
 

I recall driving in the dark in rural northern Virginia with a good friend of mine, also a crazy audiophile, to find the home of a guy who owned the PF C7, so we could have a listen. I think he was a dealer who could also sell us one.  And you are correct; it was a cult piece for a while. Once we got to the destination, neither of us was blown away by the SQ, but there were the usual caveats about the downstream equipment including speakers that would make it unfair to judge from this temporal distance.

panzrwagn's avatar
panzrwagn
655 posts
 

@dynacohum Don't know where you're coming from ...

Actually, I do. And I love the Zappa punn in your user name.

I was going to write almost exactly the same letter, but you beat me to it. I also read the long and detailed Keith @ Darlington Audio history, waiting for him to reference Tom Holman and Henry Kloss. It's like a whole arm of phono preamp history was just left out. The Advent 300, NAD 3020, APT Holman Preamp, and Marantz 3250 Preamp all shared Holman's insights and secret sauce making them among the very best phono stages available around 1975-80.

He does mention the HK Citation 11 & 12, a great middleweight pairing. One system I helped a customer build began with an Advent 300, Large Advent speakers and Thorens TD-160 / Ortofon VMS20 cart. This was what his budget allowed, and he wanted a clear upgrade path. 6 months later, he added his Citation 12 power amp, and 6 months after that, he swapped his Advents for a pair of ADS L810s. He later tried a Citation 11, but decided it wasn't a significant upgrade from  The Advent, and he'd miss the local college FM,  so he upgraded to an Ortofon MC-20 and matching transformer. That was a sweet sounding system. 

I personally owned the NAD 3020, Marantz 3250 (which I sadly sold in a moment of financial desperation), and later, an APT. I kept the APT, and recently had it rebuilt and upgraded. It remains one of the best preamps I've ever heard, and ith unmatched flexibility. 

Maybe Darlington Audio could add that missing chapter to their otherwise impressive history. Tom Holman did, in addition to his contributions to phon preamps, win an Academy Award for his development of the THX surround sound  technology.

mdalton's avatar
mdalton
607 posts
 

The founder of Leben has indicated that his inspiration for his phono pre (i have one) was the HK Citation IV, which apparently featured CR-type RIAA equalization (no negative feedback).  

lewm
13,777 posts
 

Every phono stage in history up to about 10 years ago used CR type RIAA filtering. The Citation IV was pretty nice for an early SS effort. HP loved it, I think.

pani OP
1,236 posts
 

I started this thread. Few points made so far is very interesting but some are confusing too

  1. I have been referring to phonostages of the Vintage era. Late 90s is not vintage. It was when good standalone phonostages started coming in. My concern is why didn’t we have great standalone phonostages from 50s to 80s ?
  2. Most phonostages referred so far from the 70s and 80s have been termed as nice but noisy. Not great by today’s standards. That’s what i am trying to say too. They didn’t great standalone stages
  3. To rephrase my own OP, I don’t know of any top quality phonostage from the vintage era that is sought after and worth putting into a high end system. This is in stark contrast to other analog components which still appreciates in price for their high sonic performance. 
     

The point of all this discussion is, if high end standalone phono-stages is a modern concept (like DACs and Streamers) without any legacy to refer, there is still a lot of innovation left to be done and given that analog is such a small market, not sure if there ever will be some final designs like we have for TTs and cartridges 

 

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