Budget Phono Preamps - how good are they?

[TLS Guy]

None of what Quad and some of the other brands did was mainstream consumer goods- people used to listen to the music, not the equipment. I'm not saying we need to give up trying to make it sound better, but the crap that has come out in the last 40 years is ridiculous and the practice of trying to change the world with a power cord or cable stand really needs to stop.

Back in the fifties, sixties and seventies and actually into the eighties, in the UK Quad was very much mainstream and you would find it in many homes. In the UK, Quad, Leak, Rogers and Armstrong were leading brands, with Quad and Leak being the leader in the separates crowd. In those days, Hi-Fi was very much main stream in the UK.

 

[highfigh]

Back in the fifties, sixties and seventies and actually into the eighties, in the UK Quad was very much mainstream and you would find it in many homes. In the UK, Quad, Leak, Rogers and Armstrong were leading brands, with Quad and Leak being the leader in the separates crowd. In those days, Hi-Fi was very much main stream in the UK.

In the UK, but not in this country, so when I write 'mainstream', I mean worldwide. People in some countries have been more interested in technical things but you may have forgotten that the US still hasn't adopted the Metric System. Oh sure, it's used by some, but so many resist using it that it's embarrassing.

Their success was basically local, since it only takes hours to drive from the South of England to the tip of Scotland- considering it mainstream when discussing it with people outside of GB is kind of similar to Americans thinking that our country has old buildings and a long history.

 

[TLS Guy]

In the UK, but not in this country, so when I write 'mainstream', I mean worldwide. People in some countries have been more interested in technical things but you may have forgotten that the US still hasn't adopted the Metric System. Oh sure, it's used by some, but so many resist using it that it's embarrassing.

Their success was basically local, since it only takes hours to drive from the South of England to the tip of Scotland- considering it mainstream when discussing it with people outside of GB is kind of similar to Americans thinking that our country has old buildings and a long history.

That is true. There was a Hi-Fi craze in England post WW II. Yes, it is true that scene over there was far in advance of what was going on in the US, and actually Europe. Ampex was an America bright spot though. I think a big part of that was due to Gilbert Briggs, founder of Wharfedale, and his protege Raymond Cooke, founder of KEF.
They really energized the DIY movement, which I think made the whole hobby contagious. Those were really fun times. I think that also energized innovation.

 

[sterling shoote]

Back in the days before the manufacturers deleted the phono preamp and people were all in on CDs, etc, not a lot of attention was given to the phono stage unless they had a cartridge that needed special care & feeding (or, you talked to someone at a high-end audio store and in that case, anything they didn't sell was crap). At that time, it was hard to find a phono section that wasn't decent even in mid-priced equipment and most MC preamps were able to provide enough gain unless it was a special case, like the Denon 103d, which is what I still use. The output is ridiculously low and some preamps don't provide enough gain to allow using it and returning to a different source without being blown out of the room. If you decide to buy an MC cart and use it with your P6, you're welcome- I spoke with Richard Schramm about the gain in the P5 being lower than the Sony integrated amps I had and have, so they seem to have had enough requests to add another 10dB.

In the old days, nobody cared if their phono preamp was special and that's the way we liked it!

Get off my lawn!

Exactly

 

[highfigh]

That is true. There was a Hi-Fi craze in England post WW II. Yes, it is true that scene over there was far in advance of what was going on in the US, and actually Europe. Ampex was an America bright spot though. I think a big part of that was due to Gilbert Briggs, founder of Wharfedale, and his protege Raymond Cooke, founder of KEF.
They really energized the DIY movement, which I think made the whole hobby contagious. Those were really fun times. I think that also energized innovation.

Have you seen the history of Ampex and who was behind the funding of it? Bing Crosby. His audio engineer brought magnetic tape recorders from Germany after WWII and according to the link, the engineer started talking about the possibility of recording video to tape only four years after the advent of TV.

1956: Ampex VRX-1000 First Commercial Video Recorder

The concept for the videotape recorder hails from Bing Crosby’s audio engineer, Jack Mullin, who brought the first German tape recorders to America after World War II. In 1946, Crosby fronted Ampex the capital to begin building audio tape recorders. Four years later, with the advent of...

www.mixonline.com

People loved buying records- during bad times, it took their minds off of their problems for awhile and advances in technology allowed better audio to exist.