Next Phonostage

I have the original Thoress & a Pass XP25. Both excellent. Pass is amazing fr extremely low gain cartridges with exceptional bass (probably the best there is) and detailed natural mids. The highs are warm but maybe lacking the tube magic. A great match for .20mV cartridges that need 72db of gain. The Thoress is something else. An exceptional match for my Titan I. Great detailed bass, just not Solid State bass and not the Pass. But there are no better highs IME. Something magical. Pure, detailed, I wouldn't say holographic as it sounds like music and not musical. There is no phono stage. Just excellent. Tron make several phono stages and I owned the original which didn't match my higher gain art ridge at the time. Cartridge matching is important. Gain especially.

TW uses quite a few phono stages. He tries everything and even solid state and Allnic before anyone in the US heard of it. He also tries many cartridges so finding different pairings is part of bein a designer.

I have had my Thoress for years. I want to sell it to try something else but know it will be a mistake as the cost of anything better will be three times the amount. And will it do the mids and highs as well? So I stay put. The biggest compliment I can give is for equipment to get me off of the merry go round. And I have been with the Thoress for at least five years if I remember right. No problems. Just music. I just need 0.3mV or up cartridges. Deciding what is next for the extra inputs but nothing yet has caught my attention. And I have tried a ton of cartridges with it. I love being able to compare cartridges on the fly and not worry about transformer matching which means you would need a different transformer depending on the cartridges impedance for optimal performance.

I wanted to respond to Wrm57 who said he had a hum problem with his Allnic H-3000. I had the same problem, but I solved it by plugging my preamp into the same zone on my power conditioner that has the H-3000 and my turntable. Before, when I had the hum, I had the preamp plugged into a separate zone.

I am another very satisfied Allnic H-3000 owner. Mine has a bit of tube rush, but you have to listen very close to the speakers to hear it. In my experience, a minor bit of tube rush is typical and not unusual for tubed components and is not a concern to me. I would like to hear the opinions of the esteemed posters here on whether the typical amount of tube rush that is found in many tubed components would compromise Philb7777's priority of a "really" black background, especially given the fact that he has ultra quiet Rowland components in his system.

When I first plugged my Steelhead in, I experienced some hum. Played around with a couple of things, and couldnt really get rid of it. Then I just ended up plugging the turntable into a different power strip, and voila, the hum disappeared completely. Just like that. Now I have dead silent operation, beautiful music and exceptional dynamics.
Note, when I had the hum, the turnable was plugged into the same power strip as when I used my SimAudio Lp5.3 and had no hum. So, I dont know why, but changing worked.

Thaluza- on the question of tube rush/noise, i can hear everything over my Avantgarde Duos at 104db efficiency, funky AC, grounding issues, and neither the Steelhead nor the Allnic gave me a problem with noise, tube, grounding or otherwise. A pretty astute listener came to visit a few weeks ago, and was amazed at how quiet the system is, you have to put your ear to a horn to hear any noise at idle with the gain up. Ambient noise in the room can mask things too. For example, while my central air conditioning is pretty quiet, I can hear it. So, I crank the air con to meat locker levels, then shut off to listen; when the tubes make the room too warm, i'm taking a break, cranking up the air con again.