Sutherland's Phono Block

"I made this for myself," explained the genial Ron Sutherland, as he showed me the interior of his new monophonic phono preamplifier ($9800/pair). The power supply on the right, which uses both choke and RC smoothing, feeds DC to the active circuitry on the left via a ribbon cable running in a channel machined in the front panel. Plug-in daughterboards are used to change loading and gain and three chassis grounding options allow for the lowest noisefloor: floating, grounded directly, and grounded via a 50 ohm resistor. Ron has used 1/8"-thick circuit boards to lower dielectric effects. There are two outputs to allow a mono cartridge to to be fed to both left and right inputs of the phono preamplifier.

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