Sutherland 2020 vs Parasound jc 3

Sksos1,
thank you for your reply.
Did the jc3 change a lot during break in? the new jc3 with a handfull of hours on it sounded so thin and truncated that it would take a major amount of improvement to be satisfactory to me. The difference between the excellent reviews and the mediocre performance i heard made me wonder if review samples are better or if i had an electrical mis match problem with my preamp which i found was not the case. a new sutherland 20/20 is suffering from similar issues.....

I have a JC3 with a few hundred hours on it, the sound is definitely more fleshed out versus new but it's also fair to say that it is very neutral overall, not warm and romantic sounding by any means.

The bottom end on the JC3 is the best I've heard in my system so I would not characterize it as being truncated in the least.

It's also by far the quietest phono stage I've heard and very juicy in terms of gain as well.

I love mine but I can see how some may be looking for something different from a phono stage. Regardless of what you choose, I wouldn't take it too seriously until you have some hours on it.

I have Parasound JC line stage and power amps, and considered the JC3 for my phono.

Only thing that held me back was a total inflexibility of input loading (capacitive and resistive) that a phono preamp at this price should have. Plus, no gain alternatives as well besides the two MM/MC.

As far as noise goes, it must be much better than it's specs by a lot, because a lowly CA 640/650 trounces it on paper.