Nagra plp versus CAT ultimate mk 2

Well here is a quick first impression .
Tonal balance is very much the same as it should be with neutral products , the nagra is kind of thin on the bottom compared to the cat .
The cat is much heavier/mightier on the lower freq .
Down side of the cat is that it produces record rumble during playback .
The woofer makes uncontrolled movements when the needle is on the record , although i dont hair them ,i dont like the sight of it, for the rest the phonostage is very good .
Both are very good preamps where the nagra is a bit lean glassy sounding the cat is more solid/ rounded/slightly tubey sounding .

The cat is more relaxing sounding is my impression , the cat is very quit on the line stage , with a bit noise on the phonostage , maybe a little bit more as the plp

Did you try changing tubes on the phono stage?

No i just have it playing , and the imbuscrews are english so i have to take the right tools to open it from work.
You think its a broken tube ?
What is the phono section of the cat? inside left rightside ?

Not sure about tube location as I only owned the linestage version. Not sure you actually have a problem with tube, but they can get noisy over time and it always seems to be good practice to put in a new set of tubes when you buy used gear, you never really know how much mileage is on the tubes. It certainly seemed to be a very quiet linestage, but phono stages can be problematic unless you have very low noise tubes.

i ll have them checked later on .

the one thing i can say after listening to my favourite lp collection and the thing being under current for half a day now .
The cat is very good , it doesnt have the glassy/edginess of the nagra instead its al about natural , musical flow , you can definetively hear deeper into the mix and the bandwith is greater /more bas extension .
I think it was a good exchangetrade