Ask a designer

[jammy395]

Why bother with suts - aint it just another component in the signal path................

[Dr Bunsen Honeydew]

That's not the question Jammy, you have to have something there as you have to amplify the cartridge. The choice and argument is active or passive.

[jammy395]

Something to be said for the good old Gramaphone then.......

KEEP IT SIMPLE............png (33.06 KiB) Viewed 3196 times

[howardc1951]

As a matter of interest Richard do you use transistors or ic's in your active MC preamp circuit and is there a lot of difference anyway?

[Dr Bunsen Honeydew]

Well that is a good one as it refers to one of the famous late 70's / early 80's brainwashes perpetrated by the flat earth Linn / Naim team which seems to have been stuck into hifi folklaw and now forum bullshit.

Encapsulation (the process of creating IC's from active and passive components etched onto a substrate) started in the 1960's so that NASA could build a small enough computer so they could navigate to the moon. Now for computers all you are asking transistors to do is switch on and off, so basically DC functions. This meant that early amplifier chips were DC amplifiers and not very good at AC. Coinciding with this Silicon small signal transistors were improving enormously over their Germanium predecessors. This was the period early Naim amplifiers were being designed and built, so they quite correctly said IC were not as good as discrete. This changed quite quickly with the Mullard TDA1034 (which became the Signetics NE5534) being the first good AC op-amp, this put IC's on a par with discrete but not always better depending on circuit design. By the mid 80's new op-amps appeared that took the IC beyond the capabilities of available bi-polar small signal transistors, but then in some ways the transistor caught back up with small signal FETs (field effect transistors). Now-a-days though the chip op-amp is way ahead in most parameter such as noise and bandwidth so there is little argument that using the best available IC's (much choice) is now better.

But per usual we are stuck with the brainwash and bullshit which is still spouted on the forums. Because IvorT and JulianV pronounced so their brainwashed sheep continue to spout it like reading from a bible. Forget the flat earth and lets get back into reality!!

Ah your question - I use chips, very good ones. But no salt and vinegar.

[howardc1951]

I must say I prefer the ones from the local kebab shop than the ones from the local fish and chip shop.

[Dr Bunsen Honeydew]

That's fries not chips. I remember real chips fried in beef dripping, absolutely delicious.

[Lindsayt]

As well as phono cartridges, are tape heads also naturally balanced?

[Dr Bunsen Honeydew]

Not sure never been involved with them from a service or design POV.

[Dr Bunsen Honeydew]

I missed this post from earlier

Quote from a SUT manufacturer:
(They also make a very nice interconnect apparently!)

"Transformers have much more benign distortion characteristics than active circuits and they are capable of producing a truly sublime soundstage with detail and separation unsurpassed by the more common transistor and op-amp alternatives."

Quote from several people I've met:
"I've read it on the internet so it must be true!"

Having lit the blue touch paper I'll retreat!

Bullshit - they are coils so they are filters, that is why some people like them. I will do a big post tomorrow too late tonight to do this subject justice.

But I will say one thing, if in 1960 I had invented a lower noise small signal valve than they had back then Ortofon and other moving coil pick-up makers would have been biting my hand off to supply them. The *ONLY* reason they used transformers was that the available active circuits were too noisy.

Now we have low noise active circuits transformers for this application are as archaic as valves and just as unnecessary, just not as dangerous or as illegal.