Eldartford,
Is the better MM cartridge you upgraded to the Shure V15MR or another unit? When you compared MM and MC cartridges through your Tandberg how did you equalize the listening levels?
CD playback is great and has come long way since it was first introduced. However, no CD player to date has outperformed my analog playback. This includes some highly regarded and top-of-the-line CD players (modded or otherwise) that I was lucky to hear in my system recently and within the last two years.
As to MM/MC comparisonsÂ… In a resolving and musical system (using well recorded, uncompressed acoustic media) one should expect to hear the difference from one IC to another, especially if you often attend live acoustic performances. One should also expect that this is the case when you introduce new speaker cables, PCs, line conditioners, vibration control platforms, and tweaks like footers/couplers, etc. The introduction of different capacitors or attenuators within a preamp, for example, can noticeably affect the overall sonic presentation. Resistors are no exception.
The Tandberg sounds like a well designed preamp. However, despite the nearly identical MM and MC circuits (and despite the use of the same transistors), the small differences including the presence of the resistors in one phono section to address the outputs of MM vs. MC cartridges add variables that confounds the results of a comparison between these different types of transducers.
Consequently, one cannot conclude that the differences you hear is due only to the two types of cartridges. Moreover, it is not an easy task to verify or isolate the sonic effects introduced by the differences between the MM and the MC phonostages within the same unit. So even with the use of the Tandberg, an evaluation of a MM vs. a MC cartridge is not an apples-to-apples comparison.
Is the better MM cartridge you upgraded to the Shure V15MR or another unit? When you compared MM and MC cartridges through your Tandberg how did you equalize the listening levels?
CD playback is great and has come long way since it was first introduced. However, no CD player to date has outperformed my analog playback. This includes some highly regarded and top-of-the-line CD players (modded or otherwise) that I was lucky to hear in my system recently and within the last two years.
As to MM/MC comparisonsÂ… In a resolving and musical system (using well recorded, uncompressed acoustic media) one should expect to hear the difference from one IC to another, especially if you often attend live acoustic performances. One should also expect that this is the case when you introduce new speaker cables, PCs, line conditioners, vibration control platforms, and tweaks like footers/couplers, etc. The introduction of different capacitors or attenuators within a preamp, for example, can noticeably affect the overall sonic presentation. Resistors are no exception.
The Tandberg sounds like a well designed preamp. However, despite the nearly identical MM and MC circuits (and despite the use of the same transistors), the small differences including the presence of the resistors in one phono section to address the outputs of MM vs. MC cartridges add variables that confounds the results of a comparison between these different types of transducers.
Consequently, one cannot conclude that the differences you hear is due only to the two types of cartridges. Moreover, it is not an easy task to verify or isolate the sonic effects introduced by the differences between the MM and the MC phonostages within the same unit. So even with the use of the Tandberg, an evaluation of a MM vs. a MC cartridge is not an apples-to-apples comparison.
