A great question. Some remasters are better, but often, original pressings are where the gold lies! The answer varies according to the album and the pressing, due to many technical factors, but remastered records are often worse than excellent, lightly played original pressings, and in my experience, only occasionally better. A Golden Example A classic […]

I don’t like either very much, but I generally recommend a good moving magnet cartridge over a cheap moving coil. If you have, say, around $500 AUD to spend, and assuming you are chasing a medium-compliance cartridge for a typical medium-mass tonearm, there are lots of choices. Moving coil cartridges are technically better for a

Either a good step-up transformer or a really good (5k+) active gain stage. There is no one best phono preamplifier, but almost nothing does a better job of taking extraordinarily small signals from a moving coil cartridge and amplifying them than a top-notch step-up transformer. The only thing better is an absolutely first-class active gain

This is a really good question, variations of which I hear a lot. Let’s look at this in a little more detail. Here’s the summary, though: cartridge alignment tools are typically setup tools, not measurement tools. These setup tools are designed for various unique tonearm setups and should therefore be used with the precise equipment