John Darko
Modern problems: installing a moving coil cartridge to a turntable when our Future-Fi-focussed integrated amplifier – or headphone amplifier – only offers moving magnet compatibility.
What to do?
One solution might be to put an outboard phono stage between the turntable and amplifier to feed the latter a line-level signal (and thus bypass its MM phono stage altogether). One such example is the new Tube Box DS3 from Pro-Ject which adds balanced XLR outputs and inputs (plus stereo mini-XLR) to the previous generation’s single-ended RCA sockets. Two turntables can now be hooked up simultaneously. Pro-Ject has also added finer gradations to the Tube Box DS3’s cartridge loading. It runs a pair of 6922/E8CC tubes in a dual mono configuration to offer between 40dB and 65dB of gain to MM and MC cartridges. Price? €1049. Your choice of black or silver.
What might not be obvious from browsing Pro-Ject’s website is that the Tube Box DS3 is juiced by a sizeable outboard linear power brick, which in turn needs to see mains power action. If we’re down with adding another component but not its power supply – or if we’ve exhausted all available power outlets with other components – there is an alternative solution…
A step-up transformer (or SUT) is a passive component that requires no external power to lift the voltage level of an MC cartridge’s output to MM level, ready to be fed into an MM phono stage. The internal transformer’s windings do the heavy lifting. On this, Pro-Ject now offers two devices: the dual-mono MC Step Up Box S3 (€449) with RCA terminals joining two cartridge impedance settings on the back; or the dual-mono MC Step Up DS3 B (€899) which adds balanced XLR outputs and inputs plus Lundahl LL1678 input transformers. Again, your choice of silver or black.
All new Pro-Ject units are Made in Europe.
Further information: Pro-Ject Audio Systems
