MC Load Resistance

Lewm, Nandric, my wife saw the thread and my last post and........... smiled.
See - that's why I love LOMCs and a very special blonde I am married to ...... demanding, but rewarding.

Nandric, Here you invoke the categorical imperative, no doubt.

Dear Lewm, Colling them 'Kantian' is an diplomatic way to
say that they are stubborn (the Germans). BTW I was not able to reach page 12 of 'The critic of the pure reason' and I was trying for an month or so. Beacause of the lenght
of his sentences as well as the used vocabulary I lost the Ariadne thread halfway of each of those sentences. I assume
that my phylosophy teacher was confronted with similar problems because I pass somehow for Kant.

Regards,

Guess it was a modern day american philosopher who stated that persistence was the only true omnipotence force in human existence (if not in the universe...).
If you had been grown up with german language in the 1960ies and 1979ies - before marketing took over all language in the western world and made us accustomed to 6-word-sentences without any commata - Kant wouldn't be all that frightening.
Funny thing that in England I was always mistaken for being french and in the USA for being british......... now what does it tell us about being german in modern times ?

A slight bit closer to topic... Dertonearm, your description of the difference between hybrid and all-tube cascode is very similar to how I would have described it.

There are a number of manufacturers that use semiconductors right at the input of their otherwise 'all tube' preamps. I feel they loose that last bit of natural detail, so I go for the tubes, although there is a little more noise. Despite that, I win back the detail that the semiconductors seem to loose.

In the last 2 years, we added a new CCS circuit that is able reject noise from the power supply while maintaining precise current for the differential cascode gain stage. This reduced noise, increased bandwidth, increased gain and reduced distortion all at once. The RIAA spec works out to 0.15mV; so with good tubes in the unit I've found no need for transformers.

We have offered the Jensen SUT as an option for years, but with the introduction of this circuit no-one has installed that option. We do run into noise issues on occasion- we have found that the vast majority of NOS tubes (that occasionally get installed by end users) are simply not quiet enough to do the job. However there is an ample supply of new tubes.

I have yet to find a transformer of any variety or application that does not have a sonic footprint, be it SUT, line, interstage or output. There are of course advantages- gain and isolation being two, but if a simple circuit can be devised to bypass the need for a transformer, then greater transparency is the immediate reward.

From a previous post I am asked to assume that you have one of the most neutral systems in the world; however I exhort you to consider that if you have heard a particular piece by a particular manufacturer, please keep in mind that we manufacturers are often doing our best to make improvements over the years and are often quite successful at that. So you would be doing any manufacturer and yourself a disfavor by 'assuming' that since you heard a unit five or ten years ago, that you thus 'know' what that product sounds like today.