best phono preamps?

Raul,

when I met you at Doug and Paul's to hear your Essential, I was stopped, for whatever reason, from bringing in my Alaap separates which I had with me at the time. We stayed with Doug's preamp. At that time, I believe that my separates were still ahead of Nick's full function preamp. So, it would have been most interesting to hear side-by-side with the Essential. Nick has since found a way to tweak his FF preamp psu to meet the performance of the separates, so today there is not much difference in the sound of the Alaaps. Unless Nick has come up with another tweak he hasn't told me about. ;-)

I do understand, from both a practical and engineering standpoint, why one may think that separates cannot approach the level of a single preamp. But it can and has been done. I agree that if one is mixing and matching phonostages and preamps that it would be most difficult to achieve this.

Still, it always comes down to implementation.

Why using a linepreamp when we can use a phonopreamp direct connected to the amp ? A good gain attenuator is better than another device/cable unit.

Jloveys, the reason for that is that you have to connect the phono section to your power amp, and control the volume somehow. A passive will not suit for this as it will behave as a tone control/dynamic compressor depending on the setting of the control.

One of the purposes of a proper linestage is in fact control of the interconnect cable. If this is done properly the quality and length of the cable will not be important! Obviously then if you are going to have a stand-alone phono section, this capability ought to be included or you have lost any benefit to simplification.

What we found is that the inclusion of the circuitry to make this so meant that a stand-alone phono section would have everything a full-function preamp would have except a couple of passive switches. IOW you might as well have the whole thing.

Interesting in theory, but then why my phonopreamps sound much clearer direct connected to the MC 275 than via the ARC LS 25 MKII ? Is it a linepreamp that is not well engineerd?

If you have separates, then the phono stage will usually have to incorporate a low impedance output stage, to make the unit compatible with a variety of linestages and so it can drive the cable itself. This means adding a cathode-follower (if tubes) or an emitter-follower (if solid state), an additional active device in the pathway, not to mention the sonic effect of the cable itself that Atmasphere and Raul mention. Cathode followers are problematic devices that inevitably add a touch of coloration, unless very carefully designed and implemented with an associated constant current source, etc. Why bother, when you can have it all on one chassis so the phono signal only has to go an inch or two to reach the linestage? The main potential advantage of separates is that it is easier to implement completely separate power supplies for each section, but this can also be achieved in well conceived all-in-one preamps, by using a separate PS chassis.