Hi Darius,
While I understand the point you are making I don't necessarily agree, and none of the cartridges I mentioned represent a significant deviation from current MC or MM cartridge design and manufacturing practices with the exception of the Grado Statement series which electrically behave a lot like medium output MC type cartridges.
I used 12AX7A/ECC83 in the front ends of all of my older phono stage designs and found thermal noise, 1/F noise and pop corn noise objectionable in many of my designs. (Whether or not I used cathode bypass caps and some of my older designs did not - this is a problem obviously because cathode resistor thermal noise is also amplified.) This was still true with the 5744 which has typically 4 - 5x the transconductance of the 12AX7A - and therefore would be expected to exhibit less thermal noise, but actually seemed worse, and 1/F noise is not correlated apparently to other common tube design parameters.
I am not sure that tracing noise (the phenomena you refer to) is in any sense a constant, but to some extent a function of stylus design. I've owned quite a few cartridges over the years and some were better or worse in this regard, some with quite audible noise on low level passages, and others where it was much less audible. I think stylus geometries play a really big role here, the Platinum is very quiet even through headphones - and yes I can still hear tracing noise.
My feeling is if the RIAA stage is contributing audible noise with no music playing you already have an electronically placed bound on resolution and a potential listening nuisance under some conditions.. (Headphone use for example)
The me the question is how many error contributors are you willing to live with, I am sufficiently over the top that I would prefer the mechanical components and cartridge performance to be the limiting factors in my playback system - and it really costs very little/no more to take this approach when building your system. It also gives me sufficient snr to use just about any low output cartridge without step up devices and get acceptably quiet performance - OTOH I also have even dnr for high output cartridges. I have gone to great efforts to eliminate broadband noise from my system as I use high efficiency horns on the top end and very little noise voltage present at their input terminals is quite audible. Low end issues are similar as I don't care at all for 1/F noise which was one of the motivations for choosing the D3A as it has good performance in this regard.
I guess fundamentally is there anything you would use the D3A for?
Have you ever tried one? I avoided exotics while still doing this commercially - now I just choose interesting types for my own use with what appears to be worthwhile performance attributes.. Here's the rub - they're still cheap in Germany, which is where all of mine came from.
While I understand the point you are making I don't necessarily agree, and none of the cartridges I mentioned represent a significant deviation from current MC or MM cartridge design and manufacturing practices with the exception of the Grado Statement series which electrically behave a lot like medium output MC type cartridges.
I used 12AX7A/ECC83 in the front ends of all of my older phono stage designs and found thermal noise, 1/F noise and pop corn noise objectionable in many of my designs. (Whether or not I used cathode bypass caps and some of my older designs did not - this is a problem obviously because cathode resistor thermal noise is also amplified.) This was still true with the 5744 which has typically 4 - 5x the transconductance of the 12AX7A - and therefore would be expected to exhibit less thermal noise, but actually seemed worse, and 1/F noise is not correlated apparently to other common tube design parameters.
I am not sure that tracing noise (the phenomena you refer to) is in any sense a constant, but to some extent a function of stylus design. I've owned quite a few cartridges over the years and some were better or worse in this regard, some with quite audible noise on low level passages, and others where it was much less audible. I think stylus geometries play a really big role here, the Platinum is very quiet even through headphones - and yes I can still hear tracing noise.
My feeling is if the RIAA stage is contributing audible noise with no music playing you already have an electronically placed bound on resolution and a potential listening nuisance under some conditions.. (Headphone use for example)
The me the question is how many error contributors are you willing to live with, I am sufficiently over the top that I would prefer the mechanical components and cartridge performance to be the limiting factors in my playback system - and it really costs very little/no more to take this approach when building your system. It also gives me sufficient snr to use just about any low output cartridge without step up devices and get acceptably quiet performance - OTOH I also have even dnr for high output cartridges. I have gone to great efforts to eliminate broadband noise from my system as I use high efficiency horns on the top end and very little noise voltage present at their input terminals is quite audible. Low end issues are similar as I don't care at all for 1/F noise which was one of the motivations for choosing the D3A as it has good performance in this regard.
I guess fundamentally is there anything you would use the D3A for?
Have you ever tried one? I avoided exotics while still doing this commercially - now I just choose interesting types for my own use with what appears to be worthwhile performance attributes.. Here's the rub - they're still cheap in Germany, which is where all of mine came from.
#22
Hi Kevin,
I am using standard ≈5mV @1KHz, 5cm/sec. (MM) cartridges.
Thus I don't have tube noise problems.
For other low signal cartridges you need a transformer
or a low noise pre pre.
(This is one reason why I don't like low level cartridges.)
I didn't use the D3a.
Kind regards,
Darius
Hi Kevin,
I am using standard ≈5mV @1KHz, 5cm/sec. (MM) cartridges.
Thus I don't have tube noise problems.
For other low signal cartridges you need a transformer
or a low noise pre pre.
(This is one reason why I don't like low level cartridges.)
I didn't use the D3a.
Kind regards,
Darius
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