Koss 76 manual GEORGETOWN, on

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may now, therefore, make sense. Or it may not. It’s your choice which horse to bet on.

A true test would require having two LP-12’s that are absolutely identical, getting one of them modified, and then

12 ULTRA HIGH FIDELITY Magazine

having both properly adjusted by some- one who didn’t have a vested interest in the outcome. It’s not the sort of demo any store is likely to offer.

I recently wrote to you questioning if I needed to have my speakers connected to my tube amp even if I was listening to it via the headphones. You expected that my headphones would provide sufficient load on the amp, and that the speakers did not need to be connected. But I expect that one day I will turn on the amp and will have forgotten to either attach the speakers or the headphones, and then…

So, I would like to make a pair of 8 ohm resistors. Can this be done easily from a pair of speaker binding post soldered up to a 8 ohm resistors, or is it more complicated than that? If it is a DIY project, how do I do it? I don’t trust the guy at The Source.

Tim Leeney

GEORGETOWN, ON

We’re not sure why you want those 8 ohm resistors, Tim. You can’t leave them connected all the time, and the danger remains that you might turn on the amplifier when none of the loads is con- nected: speakers, phones or resistors.

That said, we can understand why you’re wary of the people at The Source (full name, for the benefit of non-Cana- dians, is The Source by Circuit City, the sign affixed to what used to be Radio Shack stores). The resistors you’re likely

to find there have a power rating of a quarter watt, and we’re being optimis- tic. Put any amount of power into one, and…poof! Followed by possibly another poof from a tube in your amplifier.

You’ll need a power resistor from an electronics supply house, and you may have to put several resistors together to get the rating you need. When we made up the dummy load we use in amplifier tests, we purchased three large precision 24 ohm resistors and connected them in parallel (24 divided by 3 is 8). If we had found 2 ohm resistors, we could have wired four of them in series (four times 2 ohms is 8).

I just replaced my aging Dual turntable with a Goldring GR2. I also replaced my Rotel RQ970 with an ASL Phono LUX DT. The Dual had a Grado Green cartridge with a 5 mV output. The GR2 uses the Goldring 1012GX, with a 6.5 mV output. The ASL phono stage has 41 dB of gain. Is this combination too much gain? I don’t know the gain on the Rotel, but with my old combo I had to turn up the volume much more to get an equivalent output level (as CD). The current Goldring/ASL combo is at least the same, but probably slightly more than what I get from most CD’s.

What are the drawbacks of this combo? Should I be looking for a lower gain phono preamp, or should I stop worrying and enjoy the music?

Tim Leeney

GEORGETOWN, ON

We suggest enjoying the music, Tim. It’s normal to hear some hiss when you turn up the volume on a phono stage. A worse sign would be hum that is louder than the hiss. The output voltage from even a moving magnet phono pickup is a thousand times lower than that from a CD player or other component. What’s important is that the noise not be notice- able from listening position even in a quiet room.

The output difference between the Grado and Goldring cartridges is not significant, a mere 2.3 dB. Even so, it could be accounted for merely by dif- ferences in testing methods of the two companies. Those figures are what are called “nominal output.” Translation: well, we had to say something.