Phono Preamp Settings/Question - Help Please

Correct, as to whether you will have enough headroom I suspect it will be fine as long as your record diet is not primarily house 12” singles (see here for a discussion of what the 1kHz 5 cm/sec means https://repforums.prosoundweb.com/index.php?topic=26987.0)

i do worry however about high frequencies which per RIAA standard are 20dB up on 1kHz, you’ve only got 10dB of headroom but how many tracks have full scale recordings at 10kHz and up? Let’s suggest you steer clear of test records!

Thanks for your input and the resource!

That’s only half the story. What is the sensitivity, and full output of your amp and the sensitivity of your speakers?

My amp's sensitivity is 2.24v, however its a 500W amp and I've had plenty of success with 2v out from my dac directly driving my amp. I have kef ls50's which I believe are 85db sensitive.

The manual is not so good:

https://www.musicalfidelity.com/uploads/catalogerfiles/mx-vynl/4_MX-VYNL_manual_issue_1.pdf

....but it looks like you can set it for MM with the added 6db switch on and that yields a sensitivity of 2.5 mV for full output, which is 4 volts. If someone reads this differently, please correct me.

I think that, with this setting, your 4mV cartridge will be able to have more than enough gain to output sufficient voltage necessary to drive your amp into clipping without overloading the phono stage and still loading the phono cartridge at 47K, even taking into account the losses of the passive volume control.

Although it is a solid-state phono stage, and so it should not be an issue, the thing that I don’t see is the output impedance, which can be an issue when using passive preamps into solid-state amps with lower input impedances.