Moving Coil Cartridge loading

[steve-z]

Glad you got sorted. I use a Mani in my study system and actually rate it rather highly on moving magnet. I have a couple of pretty decent step up transformers and with these it seems to me to punch well above its weight too. But I guess the Fono is a one box solution.

Tbh I don’t think there’s a better reasonable priced phono stage for MM cartridges than the Mani, unfortunately it’s not as good on MC. If they made the input impedance the same as most others it could be better. Yes I agree the Fono MC is a good one box solution.


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[Firebottle]

Excellent result Steve

[steve-z]

Thought to try a bit of experimentation this morning, with the amount of adjustment available I thought it might be interesting. I upped the input impedance from 100ohms to 150ohms and had a listen, not a big difference but a noticeable one and beneficial to my ears at least probably lifting the extreme top end by a db or so, the rest of the frequency range unaltered as far as I can observe, I think I may stick with it on this setting. A quick AB with a track or two on digital shows the balance to be very close, it did also show up the Rega has just a touch more bass weight than the digital counterpart but it’s marginal, all good stuff.
Edit:- After a long evening of listening I’ve decided to go back to the 100ohms load setting as although the slight lift in the treble seemed beneficial at first extended listening showed it to impart a slightly brittle character on some music which disappeared when I went back to the 100ohms setting which seems to be optimum so I’ll be sticking with that.
Checking the specs and comparing to the Mani it’s obvious the Rega has considerably greater gain, in fact on low it has 4.5db more gain than the Mani on high and it manages to do it with an even lower noise floor, the Fono MC is definitely an impressive piece of kit.

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