step up for mc

Touche, Arthur! :) The iron in my Lectron is excellent, but the intricacies of the signal from the catridge have already been flushed out by then.

And apologies to all for my over-simplistic, barely intelligible attempts at explaining why I don't think transformers are the best way to go for MC gain stage. That's a side effect of watching a baseball game, football game, catching up on audio threads all at the same time. And, with it being a holiday weekend, all spiced up with a bit of Ol' Number 7.

I also used to own Aesthetix and I would completely agree with Herman that compared to that implementation I would take the step-ups in a heart beat. But transformers over my Alaap MC gain stage or Raul and Jose's Essential? No way.

Since we don't know what cartridge he's planning on using, I'm not sure that the transformers would be the easiest solution for Havel. There is still quite a bit of load tweaking he'll have to do to optimize things.

Get the K&K step-up. I used one and for the price it is hard to beat. You can swap resistors very easily to custom load your cartridge. I sold mine only because I moved up to the K&K SE phono stage.

Dan, at the level of equipment you are talking about the difference in transformer vs. active starts, or probably has long been, a matter of taste. We're talking here about boosting a MC up so a CJ PV10A can use it, not replace the pre with a mega-buck phono stage. I've owned one and the CJ is a great pre for the money, but it isn't practical to mate your suggestions to a $700 preamp. Transformers are the only practical solution.

AND, loaded on whiskey or not, quality step up transformers do not lose any detail vs. an active stage. On the contrary, at some point the lowest level signals from the cartridge fall below the noise floor of the active input stage and are therefore lost. This doesn't happen with a transformer.

Dear Halev: I don't want to argue ( this time ) what others already posted about step up transformer but IMHO the best step up transformer is no step up transformer.

Now, IMHO too I think that you could have a very good quality sound performance through MM cartridges ( that beats many high price MC ones ) that does not needs another stage/filter ( step up transformer/gain ) , you can find several very good MM cartridges out there.

Regards and enjoy the music.
Raul.

I think Raul has the most sensible solution. Save the money you would spend on the transformers and extra cables and put it towards a better MM cartridge.