Only if you understand that with phono preamplifiers, like everything else, you get what you pay for.

There is enormous variation among phono preamplifiers and the only time you should buy a cheap phono preamp is to add vinyl playback to an affordable system that doesn’t have already it, where you don’t care too much about the results and if your budget is limited.

That use case does not reflect most of my customers or their scenarios, it’s worth making the point. If you DO care about the sonic results, cheap phono preamps are never a good idea. They tend to be coarse, 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 it continues 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…