Tube Preamp Paired with Tube Phono Stage?

Actusreus, how much gain does your preamp have? As Layyi mentioned, his preamp has 13 db of gain, mine has 22 db of gain. Either when combined with a 60db phono stage would be more than enough for most any cartridge I can imagine.
I just sold a phono stage with 66 db of gain while using a cartridge with a 0.24 mV output. Combined with my 22 db of gain from the line preamp, I never turned the volume knob much past 10 o'clock. Together that combo provided 88 db of gain, I'm sure I could have gotten by on 82 db of gain very easily. While doing your KAB number crunching, don't forget to add in your line stage's gain, unless of course your line stage has no gain.

Thank you Al. I've always been interested in the interplay, for lack of a better word, between volume and gain. I understand they are obviously not the same thing, but certainly more gain at a given volume = louder sound. So with variable gain settings gain can also be used as volume control, even though in a more dramatic way.

As a correction to my post regarding resistive loading in the JC-3, it actually has two settings, not one, for MC cartridges: 100 Ohm and 47k Ohm.

Jmcgrogan2,
I'm not sure, but as I mentioned in one of my posts above, my preamp has five gain settings so it certainly does have gain. I might be wrong, but I believe the KAB calculator only considers the gain of the phono stage. It's possible that an assumption is made as to the base line preamp gain. You can read more about this at www.kabusa.com

Btw, for a cart with an output of 0.24 mV, you apparently need 63 dB of gain so it makes sense that you found 66 dB to be more than enough. I just experienced the opposite a few times, so I am always very careful about matching the phono preamp gain with the cartridge output.

The KAB calculator considers preamp gain period. That's phono preamp + preamp gain. So the calculator said I needed 63 db and I had 66 + 22 = 88db of gain. Way more than enough. I probably could have gotten by with a phono stage with a 50-54 db of gain for my 0.24 mV output cartridge. Maybe I could have turned the volume knob up to 1 or 2 o'clock instead of 9 or 10 o'clock.

Jmcgrogan2,
That has certainly not been my experience. My current phono preamp came with a factory preset gain of 29 dB for MM cartridges and it was not enough to drive my temporary Shure M97-xE that outputs 4 mV. It simply didn't have enough volume even though I could not go past 12 o'clock when I played CDs. I then had the manufacturer up the gain to 39 dB and it solved the problem. As an experiment, I also ran the cartridge using the built-in phono stage in my then-amp, Rogue Cronus Magnum, that had a gain of 35 dB in the phono stage before the line preamplification and the difference was tremendous. According to the KAB calculator, an optimal gain for the Shure was 38 dB...

I experienced a similar problem with my original cartridge, Soundsmith Aida, which had an output of 2.12 mV, when I used it with the built-in phono stage in the Cronus. When I switched to a separate phono preamp (Soundsmith MMP3) with 43 dB of gain, the volume was much higher and just sufficient, which obviously points to the low gain in the phono stage as the problem. Well, the KAB calc is 44 dB for an output of 2.1 mV so, in my opinion and experience, it provides a pretty good estimate of an optimal gain for a given cartridge in the phono stage independent of the line stage. How differences in line stages would affect that calculation, I frankly do not know.