Phono cartridges produce an output signal that is tiny, being inducted only by the bouncing and shimmying of a diamond through a vinyl groove. To play this into a line-level amplifier input, the signal needs to be much bigger — boosted by a phono preamplifier, also known as a phono stage.
Moving-coil cartridge signals are even lower than those with moving magnets. And precisely because the signals are very delicate, the quality of a phono stage has a large influence on your vinyl sound. Some of the best phono stages are, unsurprisingly, made by turntable companies, as is the case here, with the Phono MC 8.2 Sym.
Build & facilities
Transrotor is a German turntable company in the city of Bergisch Gladbach, North Rhine-Westphalia. The location is more important than usual, because the — that’s ‘operating manual’ for all you non-German speakers — is not available in English, not even online, that we could find, so you can’t strip out sections and feed them into ChatGPT or Google Translate. But you’ll needsomething, because pages six and seven are needed in order to be able to use this phono preamplifier correctly. Their spreadsheet-style tables explain how to set the four dual in-line package (DIP) switches located inside the phono stage for the correct input sensitivity (between 0.07mV and 2mV), and input impedance (from 60 ohms to 4.7k ohms) to match whatever moving-coil phono cartridge you are using.
