Science & Sound, Tube or Solid State Phono?

Dear Dgad: +++++ " Does the choice depend on the cartridge in use? " +++++

IMHO a full well designed Phonolinepreamp is a design for any cartridge , its quality performance depended only on its own good thinking design and its design execution not with which cartridge is used. From my point of view a Phonolinepreamp must be a Universal-use one it does not matter MC/MM type cartridge, output cartridge level or anything else.

Regards and enjoy the music.
Raul.

Well, as always, YMMV. I have joined Lloyd Walker's camp that for LOMC cartridges, SS is the best bet. I am a tube fan, I do use a tube line stage and a tube amplifier, but I do agree with Lloyd, that for very small voltages, SS may be a more stable solution. FWIW, my cartridge outputs 0.24 mV.

Cheers,
John

Nick Doshi does the same for his MC gain stage, SS that is. From what I understand it is not easy to do, but when done right it works very well. The rest is all tubes.

I owned a phonostage once that did all of the gain stages in tubes. No SS, no transformers. Significantly more noisey. It lacked finese and other things as well.

I agree with Raul, the choice in cartridge shouldn't matter if the phonostage is done correctly.

I recently converted the first gain stage of my Atma-Sphere MP-1 MkII to SS, thanks to Lewm and Allen Wright, who posts a schematic of his hybrid phono stage for DIYers. With a medium-output Helikon this was a significant improvement over the stock all-tube design. S/N is way up, as is bass control & dynamics, without any apparent loss of favorable tube-like qualities in treble and midrange. On any day I would consider a high-gain SS or hybrid design like this preferable to a step-up transformer. (I've tried both Cinemag & Jensen step-ups.) My understanding, however, is that the all-tube MkIII version of the MP-1 is quieter than earlier versions.