UK loan programme

Thanks Stuart.

For general reference can anyone please PM me rather than writing requests here. I login when I get a chance and respond to PM's.

Too true Richard. And their compact form means I can carry several loan packages at once when needed.

Sirry I've been away with limited web access and then busier at work than I had expected. That should get through to me.

Good questions!

This taken from a very early review when I was working on a shoestring budget (i.e. I was skint and just starting out)...

"Getting into the real world I trotted off to my Father-in-Laws house and tried both stages in his system. He has a good vinyl front end (A&R Legend, RB250, V-15) and an A&R integrated from a time when most people used vinyl (i.e. a cut above current built-in stages), and a pair of similar IPL speakers to my own - personal recommendation:-) This system is warm and friendly, a nice easy listen. Swapping around phono stages showed the Gram 1 to be just that bit more detailed and fast than the on-board stage, not a huge difference but probably worth the £60 if you were looking to upgrade the amp. The Gram 2 was that bit better again, a bit more powerful sounding, but it's better soundstaging wasn't on display. Both produced nicer noises than the budget Technics CD player... "

Full review here: http://www.tnt-audio.com/ampli/gram-preamps_e.html

My history regarding phono preamplification goes back to the 70's when phono preamps weren't heard of (although RCA had a design for one which used valves). I started making them to improve the distorted sound of the disco equipment around at the time.

Skipping a lot of that history we arrive in 1979 with the new Rega Planar series turntables and high output moving coil cartridges (HOMC). It is also at a time when the integrated amplifier manufacturers are in flux between transistor and op-amp front ends.

What sounded comfy using MM cartridges suddenly took on the bright stridency of the HOMC, and I seriously considered a career change. In fact, after reading that this bright stridency was called audiophile - the place to be - I ditched all hope of becoming a hi-fi manufacturer and up until 1989 designed and made printed circuit boards for other companies.

I kept my interest in phono preamp design and was able to make myself several different configurations, or clones of what others were doing. Some actually sounded good. Although not mainstream in the market place, these phono preamps existed from around the time CD came into being. An example of one company doing such things was Sage Audio who I'd made printed circuits for.

So, back to the question. Did these old integrated's have better phono preamps built in? I can only go on the circuit diagrams I see. And what I see is a number of variations on the same theme, which uses a frequency dependent negative feedback loop for RIAA EQ around an amplifier stage using either discrete bipolar transistors or an op-amp.

What a lot of these designs lacked only surfaces through analysis and it can be seen that little research went into most of these designs. They are obviously commercial offerings and people work for companies, and it's a job, and most jobs are 9 till 5. Only idiots like me burn the midnight oil over the finer points (and I often wonder why I bother).

Another interesting thing happened in recent history which throws in more variables, making the question even harder to answer, and you won't hear it being talked about anywhere else. I know it as "shrink", and it took quite a few years for me to cotton on.

Thanks to ultra-miniaturisation (the cellphone), die sizes had to shrink to fit the tiny IC packages required. It became a game changer where problems arose swapping from a DIL op-amp to a shrink package - things didn't sound as good!

Bearing in mind that a lot of phono front ends (built in or otherwise) use op-amps, then in comparing old with new some have noticed a difference. It begs the question why use op-amps? The answer being that discrete devices don't have the market they used to have and are rapidly becoming obsolete - we have lost so many great transistors and FETs to progress. So we have to accept we can't do it the old way any longer, or for much longer.

The difference really came into being on the approach to 2006, when RoHS forced chip manufacturers into making economies, and that involved replacing the old die size in all chip size offerings with the new shrink dies.

As size went down speed went up. So going back to the earlier analysis we now find that the instabilities which mattered little in older "lego block" op-amp designs, now matter. It now becomes highly important to look at these finer points, or the sound suffers.

So that may throw some light on why things might not sound as good today. It also should highlight that when working with such small signals and the degree of amplification required, that the level of R&D required to rout out the problems isn't easily achieved in a 9 till 5.

I have to ask myself the question at this stage of writing "will the reader understand or have the foggiest clue what I'm rambling on about?" and the answer is probably no, but since I've written it I may as well hit the publish button.

But, after all is said and done, the reader can use his/her ears to decide and that is why we run this loaner program. If we thought we had nothing to offer would we be doing it?