Phono Preamplifiers

While typical MM pick-ups are rated at 3-5mV output, and MCs some 10x lower, in practice they’ll all deliver far higher signal levels when tracking very highly modulated vinyl grooves. As such, it’s important every phono stage has sufficient input headroom to accommodate these increased levels without clipping.

In practice, with its passive RIAA soaking up a lot of gain, the Asterion V2’s input headroom is less generous for its balanced MC1 and MC2 in/outs – we saw something similar with the all-tube Zesto Andros Deluxe II nd ModWright PH 9.0. For example, the MC2’s huge +82.5dB gain yields an unusably high sensitivity of 75µV (or 150µV in single-ended/RCA mode) and an input limit of just 1.6mV/1600µV [red trace, inset Graph]. Even the MC1 input [black trace] has a high 136µV sensitivity and a correspondingly low input overload threshold of 3.1mV (a margin of just +15.8dB with a default 500µV-rated MC). There is a 6dB reduction in sensitivity and 6dB improvement in headroom with MCs used via the single-ended/RCA outs but all this still suggests the Asterion V2 is best used with very low-output MCs only.