Does EAR324 phono stage sound like tubes ?

I perceived the sound of the 324 as being taut throughout, but with some added noise and distortion. This tautness plus noise/distortion can also be present in live music that's neither played with good quality instruments nor in an uncontrolled acoustic environment.

I have a tendency (good or bad) of associating this kind of harmonic distortion to certain kind of music performances. I personally like the sound taut and clean, which is why I don't enjoy performances at bars or other places where the space was not originally conceived for playing music.

In the end, the 324 is enjoyable for certain time, but after a while in can be fatiguing (at least to my ears).

It is unfortunate that I never tried the MM section of the 324 since it seems to be the better designed half of this unit. I even purchased the Nagaoka MP-50, but I sold the 324 before trying this cart with it.

The 324's MM facility would certainly seem to have more attention lavished on it than is usually the case with high priced MC-capable phonoamps. This leaves me the possibility of trying a good MM or MI cart, or using an outboard SUT -- disappointing as that may seem after purchasing the 324 with its onboard SUTs. (But if it sounds better...)

As far as characterizing the overall sound goes, given the inevitable big differences among partnering carts and turtable setups, other than saying that, hum aside, this is far and away the most accomplished phonostage I've personally owned (but that's not many), I'll just restrict my comments to the particular issue I'm having with it. Fortunately, my current medium-output MC cart normally works best at the lowest-gain "40 ohm" tap setting, where the hum isn't really a problem in practical terms. But it does rankle me not to be able to utilize the lower-impedance taps if I want without the hum increasing, and I'm reluctant to make archival recordings knowing the hum is there and audible during silences and between cuts if you crank it up.

I'm going to contact Dan Meinwald and see what he has to say, but if the problem does lie in the step-up transformers themselves, or their proximity to the 324's power supply, I don't imagine anything could really be done to fix this. Interestingly, I dug out the 2004 Art Dudley Stereophile review, and although the reviewer doesn't mention anything about hum, in his measurements section John Atkinson does mention a degree of 120Hz hum he couldn't eliminate by playing with the grounding. Furthermore, with the MC step-up taps at their lowest-gain "40 ohm" setting (the only one of the three MC-loading settings he reports on regarding noise), he measured about twice the drop-off in S/N ratio between A-weighted and unweighted figures for MC mode as he found in MM mode -- a differential (of around 6dB) I'm assuming has got to be mostly due to a corresponding increase of LF hum in MC mode, and that might well have worsened if he'd also taken S/N measurements at the "15 ohm" and "4 ohm" tap settings.

Having own the 324 nearly a year now, I cannot detect any hum in my system unless of course if you place your eyes at the speaker tweeters. And it is hardly audible. It's even quieter than my Pass Xono.

I would love to try out the Einstein one day.

Hi Shoshis, assuming you're listening to MC mode in the "15 ohm" or "4 ohm" positions through a full-range system, then that sounds like you've probably got a quiet unit there, but I'll add that the hum, if you had any, wouldn't be most apparent through the tweeters -- that's primarily the random noisefloor, which is also quite low in my unit. The LF hum I have however can be very clearly detected, not only audibly, but by placing a fingertip on a woofer cone, where as a defined sinusoidal hum it feels very different from the lower random noisefloor shown in MM mode.

BTW, I noticed in Atkinson's comments in Stereophile he mentioned that he "did not find any interaction between the phono inputs". This doesn't seem to be the case with my unit however -- with a signal present at Input 1 and Input 2 unconnected, I can nevertheless hear the music faintly through the speakers when Input 2 is selected on the front panel. Conversely, when listening to Input 1 with MM mode selected at the rear panel, I can still hear some mild frequency response modification when changing SUT impedance taps at the front panel -- which correlates with the fact that the rotary-control switching transients can also still be heard, so clearly the SUTs aren't totally removed from the circuit by the rear-panel switch.

Also, when I turn my 324 off, after a slight delay I get a dying-quail high-frequency tone though the loudspeakers that lasts for a second or two, at a volume high enough that, if I don't mute or turn down my preamp first, would give me cause for concern for my tweeters. Anybody else notice this?

I really have to place my ears next to the tweeter of my Thiel 3.7 to detect anything other than dead silence. That said, my First Sound preamp is as dead quiet as well.

To sidetrack a little, does the Ear 324 use a fuse in the unit?