Signal gen to test MC phono stage

that’s what I’ve been doing but even sine wave generated from UCA and measured directly from output is all over the place, I’ve got better results from headphone output on my laptop.
Any experience with any Chinese generators, EBay and Amazon are full of these.
I have a Chinese JDS6600. And though it's a fine machine for above cartridge voltages, it's awful at MM and MC levels.
 
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There is no point in testing a MC phono stage with a signal generator. At that low level every MC amplifier has low distortion and linear frequency response. The only parameter worth testing is noise.
A phono preamplifier with RIAA frequency correction and typically ~5 mV sensitivity is another matter. Unless the two function is built in one.
 
Excuse me, but if you're going to scan and reproduce copyrighted material without permission you might at least acknowledge the source as being Morgan Jones.

Where is the requirement to attribute Morgan Jones in your post? And what did he "scan"? He just posted the same .gif you did in 2006. 19 years ago.

 
That's correct, but the pole is unavoidable, so I put it at 3.18us.

Sure, but why not put the undesired pole as high as you can? (That is, time constant as small as you can?) You are now approximating a curve that is at -0.6434 dB at 20 kHz with respect to the ideal RIAA recording curve to within 0.1 dB.

By the way, when you allow active circuits and/or inductors, you can approximate the theoretical RIAA curve very well up to 20 or 30 kHz without having to let the curve increase up to very high frequencies. Just multiply the theoretical RIAA recording curve with an odd-order Butterworth low-pass response with an order greater than 1, and use the active circuits and/or inductors to realize the complex pole pairs.

For example, you could make a 50 kHz, third-order Butterworth roll-off with respect to the ideal RIAA recording curve by combining your network with a second-order, 50 kHz Sallen and Key section with a Q of 1 and a natural frequency of 50 kHz. The response at 20 kHz then becomes -0.01765 dB with respect to the ideal RIAA recording curve, at 30 kHz, it would be -0.1969 dB.
 
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Putting the pole higher requires more loss in the equaliser and it's useful to be able to test overload of an RIAA stage, which means you don't want too much loss. But I rather suspect that the reason I put it where I did is that the component values fell out nicely. 😉
 
Owon generator arrived , I’ll do some basic tests with scope but there seems to be no white or pink noise option only Gaussian white noise. I wonder if other cheap generators are also lacking that option ?
If you want pink noise it's easy enough to build a pink noise filter and stick it on the output. Back when 1/3 octave analyzers were a thing, you wanted pink noise to produce a flat response curve. Those analyzers are what's called a constant-percentage-bandwidth analyzer (CPB). With proper spectrum and FFT analyzers (fixed percentage bandwidth analyzer) you want white noise for a flat response curve. Long ago, National Instruments made a white noise generator, the MM5437. At the end of the data sheet they show a pink noise filter- https://w140.com/tekwiki/images/2/29/MM5437.pdf
 
Why would one want to measure RIAA accuracy with noise rather than with sine waves?

I doubt that approximating pink noise with white noise and a fourth-order low-pass filter with three zeros will be very accurate. In principle you need either a half-order filter, which you can't make with lumped capacitors and resistors, or a very high order filter with many zeros that approximates a half-order filter well.
 
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