VAC Owners:Outboard Phono Stage?

Congrads, you will love the preamp. There is a cd you can buy that will give you the right level for phono and you can break the phono stage in that way a lot quicker. I will post the name of the company.

JWM, thanks. I look forward to getting that CD phono stage burner... That seems like a no brainier! I assume I would just have feed the cd player into the phono inputs... Does it do MM/MC at the same time, or does each stage burn in separately?

Alón, congratulations! That is exciting indeed.

A note of caution, though. Although the chances of a problem occurring would seem to be very remote, I personally would never connect the output of a component capable of supplying upwards of 2 volts or so into the input of a component that is designed to receive and process millivolts or less. Especially one as special and as expensive as this.

Yes, the CD may be designed to cause the player to output a suitable level, but things can go wrong. The player can fail abruptly in unpredictable ways, or go berserk. AC power can drop out, or flicker off and on, causing the player to briefly do who knows what.

As I say, chances of a problem occurring are very small. But I would take NO chances with a component as special as this one.

Best regards,
-- Al

KAB makes an inexpensive RIAA adapter that enables you to plug a CD player's output into the phono stage input to burn in the latter. I don't think it presents the same safety risk that Almarg described by using a 'burn-in' CD alone. I used the KAB device recently to burn in my new phono stage and had no issues. Almarg- think that's safer?

Bill, that looks to me like an excellent suggestion. You appear to be referring to the "KAB PreconLP™ Inverse RIAA Level Converter." It appears to be a purely passive device, using resistors and capacitors to divide down the signal level and also provide inverse RIAA equalization.

The only slight caveat I see is that when inputting to the preamp's LOMC inputs I would make sure that loading is set to 100 ohms, as opposed to a value that is much higher (e.g., thousands of ohms). Apparently the device relies on that loading, in conjunction with its own output impedance, to divide down what would otherwise be MM levels to LOMC levels.

In this case, though, even that concern is pretty much eliminated by the fact that the highest value load setting that is provided on the preamp for the LOMC inputs appears to be 470 ohms. That value would still reduce what would otherwise be MM levels by a substantial amount, probably something like 10 db (about a factor of 3 in voltage) according to my calculations.

Best regards,
-- Al