Hi Doug,
I would categorize the S&B in the very, very good category, but not in the world-class range of component. It continues to be my humble opinion that an extreme solution, whether it be a step-up or an active stage will be satisfying to the music lover.
Coming out of an after hours session at the Rocky Mountain Audiofest this October, the seeds of some very cool development in MC step-ups were planted. I have NO COMMERCIAL INTEREST in this project, but check out Dave Slagle's Intact Audio site (the forum) for ongoing discussions about what Dave is developing (http://www.intactaudio.com/).
In that Saturday night session, the likes of Frank Schröder, John Atwood (Artemis Labs), Dave, and others got together to play with step-ups.
Dave's first attempt nudged into second place behind Frank's unobtanium step-ups. For this experiment, Dave reached into his parts bag and pressed into service an autoformer volume control. In other words, it was an adhoc attempt, done on the fly, and not in the least sense of the word, a mature design.
In recent months, the boys in Fort Collins have been playing with dedicated MC step-up designs from Dave. These are the "boys from Colorado" referenced in various threads on Dave's forum. They have been playing with dedicated designs - trannies that surpass Frank's on a range of cartridges from Myabis to a Lyra Olympos.
There are some characteristics of step-ups which might be beneficial to musical reproduction.
One of them which comes to mind is bandwidth limitation. Note that trannies like the Jensens go out to 100KHz, so I'm not talking about premature HF roll-off. I suspect that some of that "juicy" sound inherent in good iron has to do with the filtration of RF Interference. This is speculation on my part.
Secondly, consider the moving coil cartridge. It's a motor assembly. The better cartridges have a reduced winding count (and the resultant output voltage) in order to minimize moving mass. Given a compatible transformer, what better way to effect gain than to "restore" some of the windings, but outside the cartridge so moving tip mass remains optimized ?
Thirdly, bass response is a function of the inductance of the trannie. It's definitely another one of those matching issues we've discussed.
Once again, it's my contention that there are multiple ways of solving a problem effectively, and the above thoughts are most definitely slanted toward my bias - in favor of trannies. I have no doubts that an extreme approach to active gain can also accomplish these ends.
Certainly, we're in agreement, that at real-world prices, MC step-ups rule.
Cheers,
Thom @ Galibier