Active FETs vs. Step-up phono stage designs

Hadn't really thought about that! We make two... it might be interesting to take a poll.

Aesthetix is all tube gain stages I believe. I believe they are all tube gain stages. I do think the mm with SUT is perhaps the "standard". However, there can be more work involved with getting SUT loading optimized. Not a big thing, just a bit more work involved.

In my case, the phono stage I use has a FET mc gain stage that is configured conservatively. I.e., most of the gain is realized through the MM stage. I can run my XV-1s through my MM stage. Obviously, it sounds much better through the mc inputs, but I think that gives an idea of how much gain is applied at each stage.

I leave the discussion now since Actusreus is really looking for designer input.

There is no general rule for a specific Design. You will find good ones, you will
find bad ones, you will find right ones, you will find wrong ones and every
designer will tell you why he went that way and not the other one....:-)
To design a good Phonostage which sounds like the real thing is quite a task,
specially when you need higher gain. The main problem today is profit and
good parts are simply expensive, see resistors, caps, wire and so on and when
everything will be tested in a lab, the costs can ruin the mark up. Hyping is
more cost efficient and it works also pretty good today.
I used for a lot of years high gain transistor stages, now I am with SUT's based
units. Here it is the comparable problem, the normal SUT's are in general cheap,
lousy and horrible from the datas. But the price counts. Top SUT's which have
excellent datas, superior channel separation and uncolored sound, they exist,
but no one buys them. Too expensive for "High End" units. No matter how much
money you are willing to spend, you don't get it. Professional Users, yes, they
do, but they tell the manufacturer what datas they want to have and they pay
the price for it..

Dan_ed,
Everyone's opinion is more than welcomed :)
Your comment about optimization is one of the issues that I was thinking of as well. It seemed to me it would pose a bit of a challenge in designing a phono stage that utilized step-up transformers rather than FETs.

I have it from a good source that Fremer's review of the Chinook is coming out, I believe, in the next issue of Stereophile. It should be an interesting read.

One challenge facing designers who wish to use solid state these days is the rapidly dissappearing discrete transistor. Good low noise parts (both bipolar and FET) are becoming harder and harder to find, because the mass market electronics industry is moving to integrated circuits soley. That means OP amps at the minimum, with other mass market parts incorporating analog audio into LSI and VLSI parts. I-Phones, I-pads, MP3 players have no need of discrete semis. If there is no volume or demand, there is no product. High end audio demand is not even on the map.

I have trying to procure a discrete transistor hybrid class A operational amplifier that is used in the professional microphone amp industry. The manufacturer tells me the parts he has used as low noise input transistors have been discontinued by the manufacturers so he is scrambling to find replacements.

Ironicly, a technology long considered obsolete (tubes) seems to have better support from a parts perspective than discrete semis.

I am a solid state biased designer, as I don't care for coupling caps and transformers in the audio chain if they can be avoided.