In recent years, in parallel to the development of new digital audio standard, is back a big interest for playing vinyl records at the highest levels. This great interest is reborn thanks to new techniques that allow you to print vinyl records of great quality and low background noise bringing the intrinsic limitations of this type of support beyond the previous barriers.
The North Star Design Phonostage was born from the need to combine a great operational flexibility with a very low noise amplifier.

The need for a great operational flexibility stems from the fact that it intends to interface with any type of existing cartridge. We can divide the cartridges into three broad categories:
MM,     high output MC,     low output MC.
Every type of cartridge has different needs of interfacing impedence and amplification factor so you need for an extreme flexibility of the phono stage.

In particular, our unity allows you to select with several intermediate steps:

          -   a gain between 40 and 60 dB and

        -  an input impedance between 30 Ohm and 100kOhm.

The electronic design is structured in a way that you can immage the circuit Phonostage build up of three parts:

1. the input stage, adapting the impedance cartridge and select the gain,
2. the de-emphasis passive RIAA,
3. the output stage.

The input stage

The first stage is crucial to achieve the best performance from the viewpoint of noise; so the first stage is a JFET differential built around Toshiba 2SK170 among the most noiseless transistor of the current production. The low noise introduced by this stage joined the high gain has allowed us to be able to manage MC cartridges with very low output.

The RIAA passive stage

The second stage consists of a network of high quality and precision resistors and capacitors.

The output stage

The last stage is structured like the first. It adds a gain of 20dB adapting the output impedance for a right interfacing with the line preamplifier.

On this unit we take care all the details: for example all the connectors are WBT high quality and the input hook up used is an handmade Litz cable for this specific application from White Gold.