Only if you understand the fairly linear relationship between price and performance with phono preamplifiers and the limitations cheap phono preamps impose.

There is enormous variation among phono preamplifiers. Cheap phono preamps really only serve one purpose and that is to add vinyl playback to affordable systems that don’t already have it. It goes without saying that one cannot care too much about sonic performance with said cheap systems.

That use case does not reflect most of my customers or their scenarios though. If you DO care about the sonic results, cheap phono preamps are never a good idea. They tend to be coarse, grainy, noisy, thin, unrefined, veiled, lacking dynamics and possess narrow soundstages and poor imaging.

What constitutes ‘cheap’? For me, anything under $1000 new for a phono preamplifier is on the cheap side. Between $2K and $4K, things get better and continue to improve from there. Pre-owned gets you orders of magnitude better value, of course.

There are good reasons why the best phono preamps are expensive. The quality of parts used in the best phono preamplifiers and attention to design and execution are extraordinary, and they need to be, given the extraordinarily small signals and high gain needed.

OK, I know you want to see inside…

Here’s a look at a later Accuphase AD-2820, from around 2011:

Wanna see a better phono preamp? Try the new Accuphase C-57: