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In Reply to: RE: I'm curious - howcum, with the vinyl resurgence posted by kavakidd on April 10, 2015 at 13:29:53
It's the declining use of vinyl - IN GENERAL. Why spend money putting in a crappy phono amp in when you can either just save the money, or put it towards a better line stage.
But there are good preamps with phono and without phono stages. Your choice. Unlike in the 90's when companies couldn't wait to get that vinyl money off their engineering backs. Phono stages were going the way of the Cuckoo bird. And companies just wanted to move onto CDs and forget vinyl ever happened.
Follow Ups:
Of course, they were wrong but that's another story. MY OP was prompted by a rave review of a new Jadis Integrated. At $15,000 a pop you'd think more would at least offer a phone pre as an option.
"Man is the only animal that blushes - or needs to" Mark Twain
There are very good technical reasons that a tube integrated amplifier shouldn't have a phono stage.
Tube phono stages benefit from clean, regulated DC heater power. This is not a reasonable implementation for all the heaters in an integrated (too much current). So, to add that bit to an integrated, you have to add a dedicated winding to the power transformer just for the heaters.
The next thing you'd want for a good tube phono stage is very well filtered, if not regulated B+. You don't really need much voltage, maybe 250-350V is plenty, but your tube integrated has B+ rails at 450-550V (and they aren't well filtered, because your integrated is push-pull class AB). So you get to shed a ton of that voltage and add a lot of parts to get the noise down, or you take the same steps as the first problem, and add another winding to the transformer.
You've added 2 windings to the PT, but there probably isn't enough room on the bobbin for 2 more windings, so you really need another PT. Since low level phono signals are pretty delicate, you should design the power transformer to run at a lower flux density, just to be safe. So now you need to toss the old transformer for the integrated and wind a new one, probably on a larger core.
After all that, you need special shielding inside the integrated, so you may need to add an enclosure around the phono preamp to shield it from what's going on in the power amp.
It's these kinds of issues in the design process that prevent many tube integrated amplifiers from having phono preamps.
In a solid state amp, the voltages are already lower, and a lot of the phono preamps will just be a couple opamps and a few other parts, so they can pop in on a card and not face the same challenges.
It removes the mystery, to at least me anyway, of the phono stage.
It always seemed like the phono stage in tube amps was quite complex and widely variable between preamps.
I had no idea the SS versions were just that simple.
thanks
charles
Why would Jadis include a phono stage in their $15,000 integrated when they can sell you this? (Take note, Kentaja and other apologists. Or are you going to tell us that for the price of a new Hyundai they couldn't build a decent phono stage into the thing?)
The auto industry analogy is simple minded. How many vehicles does Hyundai built per year? A couple million? How many of this particular integrated will Jadis sell per year? If they are lucky maybe 100?
Trying to draw a comparison between high end audio and the auto industry is silly but all too common I am afraid. Those that wish to engage in such analogies demonstrate a lack of understanding about such things as cost-of-scale, what it actually takes to keep a viable business going, etc.
The beautiful thing about the internet is everyone is entitled to an opinion even when the opinion is based on nothing more than fantasy.
So you called me simple minded. And you throw around words like "silly" and "fantasy?"
The only one who is simple minded here is the one who has lost all rational perspective in the real world. Take the cover off the Jadis preamp and tell me with a straight face that this little metal box full of 60 year old technology is worth $15,000! Indeed, there aren't many more "silly" products based more on "fantasy" on this world than a $15,000 entry level preamplifier. With a $6900 add-on phono stage required, to boot!
Yes it is expensive to do it right. However there is a "bull squirt" point.
Understand, there is a lot of expense with R&D, parts, labor, advertising etc... to produce a good preamp But there is also a point where you're advertising is directed towards the Rubes.
charles
Those prices are absurd. 22 large to get a pre and phono stage is a bit much to swallow...
-RW-
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