Jean Hiraga Bipolar MC preamp

[mhouston]

After building a number of Le Pacific jFet MC preamps I found a schematic for a bipolar version from Jean Hiraga.The low noise transistors he used are no longer available but the SSM2220 chip is. It houses two matched NPN transistors in a 8 pin form. Of course they are super low noise.

Jean likes a ton of storage caps and big batteries to run his creations. Here I used 4 X 1F (1000,000uf) caps in series to give 1F of storage across the +/- 6V rails. Construction is on veroboard and the enclosure is Hammond. Output caps are Russian PIO (0.47uf). A 25 turn trim pot makes it real easy to dial 0V at the input. On a short listen the sound is natural and flowing and appears to work well with my Audio-technica AT-FM3/MKIII.