3 Tonearms 1 preamp

Heyraz what you say makes good sense and that is what i've been doing. It creates problems with location of equipment to make it accessable and out of the way.Thought if it didn't sound good I could allways go back to cable swapping.
I will try the box I described a few posts back and hear the results.I'm pretty sure something will be lost but if I'm lucky I won't be able to detect it with my old ears. If I can hear it than in the trash it will go as it was going anyway and back to cable swapping. And BTW you or at least I would switch very often if it was easier. Since I don't have the one perfect needle, cartridge and tonearm some records may sound better with a differant approach.In fact some records do sound better , what works best for one doesn't allways work best for others.

I have 2 cartridges now, a Grado Signature 8 on a spare headshell and a Grado Reference Sonata 1 that I listen to. I recently swapped back the Signature just to check it out again, but I didn't even bother finishing one side. The Sonata was so much more refined, I'm giving the Signature to my son. I like your approach though, and I plan on trying out other cartridges in the near future. Your turntable project must have cost a lot of money, good tonearms alone aren't cheap, never mind the cartridges. I thought if you were going to the expense of assembling such an instrument, you would want the best possible scenario. In fact, I'll bet you end up with the 3 discrete setups I described earlier or finding a preamp with more than one phono input. BTW, have you considered using a line preamp in front of your main preamp to handle handle phono preamp switching? I picked up a used Acurus preamp from ebay for around $300 recently, it has 6 high level inputs. I own 3 phono sections, all sounding different, but I settled on the one I preferred. The argument could be made some music sounds better on one preamp than the another. I'll bet there's as much character in a preamp as there is in a cartridge. You know, tube vs solid state.

An issue I did not see brought up here is unless you are using identical cartridges on each tone arm, you will need to adjust the settings of the phono pre for each cart.

Well to take the guessing out I will tell you I am using an ATP-12T with an AT-160LC , AN AT-1010 with a SIGNET TK7E and an EPA-100 with an AT-150MLX going to a UREI transcription preamp that has been custom modded by a shop here in town. Also use an ADCOM GFP-400 for now which has an excellent phono section.(my opinion)The reason for the 1 table with 3 arms is to thin out my office / listening room by removing some of the turntables I have. The custom plinth is an experiment using 3 layers of 3/4''in. MDF with 2 layers of 1/2''in. hardy cement board sandwiched between. Results are amazing. This is rock solid and I cannot hear any feedback at all. My room is 12 X 12 and can play very loud with no audible feedback that I can hear. That was definatly not the case prior.

It's obvious to me now. You need a 9 position switch so you can run 3 cartridges through 3 preamps onto your high level input. Then, you can really customize your sound!!!
(took me 3 scotches to have this epiphany). Three is apparently the magic number here!