3 Tonearms 1 preamp

Bob, I did not find much loss in my conversion, but my system is tuned for tone, not high resolution, so Ymmv. I also have a preamp with an integral phono stage and just took two of the extra line level inputs and ran them to the phono stage, a different animal than what you will be doing.

On the other hand, you can buy a small project box for $8.00, four sets of RCAs for another $15.00 and a selector switch for less than $10.00 and you are there and can make up your own mind. If it works for you, you can hardwire it in. Cheap and simple. Just keep those signal paths as short as possible.

Unfortunately, finances are always the impediment. My preamp (Forte 44) has 5 high level inputs, so I could get away with 3 discrete tonearm/preamps. If I were limited to one preamp input, I'd probably swap cables whenever I decided to listen to a different tonearm/cartridge for the cleanest possible sound. Otherwise, what's the point. Besides, how often to you think you'll be swapping? Weakest link in the chain theory carries much significance with me. Cool idea though, 3 tonearms. Much easier than changing headshells.

Heyraz what you say makes good sense and that is what i've been doing. It creates problems with location of equipment to make it accessable and out of the way.Thought if it didn't sound good I could allways go back to cable swapping.
I will try the box I described a few posts back and hear the results.I'm pretty sure something will be lost but if I'm lucky I won't be able to detect it with my old ears. If I can hear it than in the trash it will go as it was going anyway and back to cable swapping. And BTW you or at least I would switch very often if it was easier. Since I don't have the one perfect needle, cartridge and tonearm some records may sound better with a differant approach.In fact some records do sound better , what works best for one doesn't allways work best for others.

I have 2 cartridges now, a Grado Signature 8 on a spare headshell and a Grado Reference Sonata 1 that I listen to. I recently swapped back the Signature just to check it out again, but I didn't even bother finishing one side. The Sonata was so much more refined, I'm giving the Signature to my son. I like your approach though, and I plan on trying out other cartridges in the near future. Your turntable project must have cost a lot of money, good tonearms alone aren't cheap, never mind the cartridges. I thought if you were going to the expense of assembling such an instrument, you would want the best possible scenario. In fact, I'll bet you end up with the 3 discrete setups I described earlier or finding a preamp with more than one phono input. BTW, have you considered using a line preamp in front of your main preamp to handle handle phono preamp switching? I picked up a used Acurus preamp from ebay for around $300 recently, it has 6 high level inputs. I own 3 phono sections, all sounding different, but I settled on the one I preferred. The argument could be made some music sounds better on one preamp than the another. I'll bet there's as much character in a preamp as there is in a cartridge. You know, tube vs solid state.

An issue I did not see brought up here is unless you are using identical cartridges on each tone arm, you will need to adjust the settings of the phono pre for each cart.