VDH Colibri XPP. Best Load impedance?

Hi Larry,

I spoke yesterday with VDH himself he confirmed me 500 Ohm! You will not find a Platin on the Web. A Platin is made only through a special order.

Josef

XPP - Colibri plastic body, platinum coils.
Platinum is much more resistive than copper, so the 500 ohms is plausible.
You should probably try and borrow a phono stage that has unlimited loading options eg Klyne 7, that you can try out.
Alternately there are some phono stages that are current sensing and do not require loading at all - eg Goldmund PH3.
You wont find many prepre's with wide loading options as they tend to be old school with loading down for LOMC's.

For my own XPP he recommends an optimum load of 200 Ohms.
I prefer to let it wide open at 47K for both of my phonostages.
I'm using :
1). A current mode active pre-pre with Siemens CCa feeding a RIAA with RCA 12SL7 / RCA 12SN7 / Philco XXB
The TT is : Symphonic Line RG6 with Pluto 9A Prestige.

2). The EAR MC4 step-up feeding a half active / half passive RIAA with Telefunken ECC803S
The TT is : Thorens TD124 II with SAEC WE-308 SX & Zonotone Z-SHELL 10 headshell.

Speakers are : Lowther P6M Ticonal in Carfrae LBH plus an added Seas T35 Exotic Soft Dome tweeter (crossing at 2.6Khz)
Amplifiers are : Berning Siegfried (for T35), 12SL7/6J5/4300B (for P6M)

As an attempt to open up more the midrange, I'm going to substitute the 300B SET for the Futterman H3aa in order to free the P6M from the Output Transformer.
So, you can realise that for my own taste, a havier load for my XPP is out of the question as there is not needed any damping. (Even on my SAEC!)

The cables are all the new VDH 3T series (Cliff, Mountain, Cloud, Air).

The VDH "The Grail" Phonostage, is also current sensing (and I've heard that VDH take a license from Goldmund).
But I'm sure that there is not a problem with the loading, as I've own VDH "The Grail', Einstein "The TT Choise", Goldmund "Mimesis 7 w/phono", CAT SL1, Klyne 7, and many lower level phonostages. Is there any possibility for another reason somewhere in the chain that asks for damping?

I have used the Colibri XPP a few years back with the Pass Xono phono, and settled on 200 Ohm loading. Since that was quite a while ago, I couldn’t remember whether I tried it with 47K Ohm though!