Before telling you in detail what this small phono stage board offers and how it works, I think some introduction is needed, just to explain why someone like myself, someone who, for a simple matter of age, has grown with digital systems, is telling you about an analogue product on www.videohifi.com.

My musical collection is, to tell the truth, still divided between formats with a 5:1 ratio between digital and analogue formats; on the other hand, a year and a half ago, before the arrival of the subject of this product feature (I wouldn't call it a review) this ratio was of 30:1.

But let's not anticipate too much. Even if I was grown with digital, as I said before, and even if one of the digital front-ends I have had was worth more than 7000 Euro when it was listed, I have never been one to accept the superiority of the CD system as an a priori; I was simply of the opinion that the necessary expense, to be able to listen to analogue with the same quality level I was used to listening to digital, wasn't justified by the low number of records I had in my possession, bought as a teen-ager.

I also thought, as many a non analogue guy thinks, that vinyl records were nowhere to be found, or too costly, if new, and unreliable if used. The analogue turn to my hi-fi addiction history was casual: the fellow addict who responded to a classified in which I was selling a pair of vintage power amps offered me to swap them with a very good quality, if long time discontinued, analogue front end: soon we agreed on the swap details.

This front end didn't include a phono stage or a cartridge; it's easy to understand that, as a digital listener - as I said before, more by calculation than by firm belief - my preamp (that old Sonic Frontiers SFL2 which still satisfyingly stars in my system) was and is line only. I began searching for the two missing items. My cartridge choice was finally in favour of the Benz Micro Scheu, a modification of that little classic of affordable analogue high end, the Glider, and one about which I will have more to tell you about in due course.

The phono preamp was a more difficult nut to crack. To take the most advantage from the rest of my system, I needed a balanced output preamp - the SFL2 sports two direct inputs, bypassing the balance control and the tape monitor circuitry: a single ended one, used by my CD player, and a balanced one. I needed compatibility with low output cartridges, a breed which always fascinated me, convinced as I was that they offered the best performance; and I needed versatility, not to be forced to throw the phono preamp away in case a low output cartridge should have shown a definite incompatibility with my RFI plagued environment. I needed also that the price wouldn't be out of proportion with the rest of my new analogue front-end. As you see, an almost impossible bill. I looked around the Internet; it was soon evident that I had three choices in front of myself: to buy a hard to find and of disproportionate price commercial phono stage; to give up the balanced output option; to build something myself. The first alternative was ruled out by itself; accepting the second one was a kind of surrender; the third one was difficult because of my inexperience as a self-builder and of the fact that my official builder, my brother, was really busy. When I was ready to surrender to the second option, and almost by chance, I found the subject of this presentation.

The DACT CT100 is sold (for Italy, by its world distributor, DACT) as a complete, populated and tested PCB. You only need to enclose it in a screened metal enclosure, if needed (and, as I said before, I need it), on which to mount the input, output and ground connectors. One or two dual power supplies, between +/-9V and +/-35V, 22mA, are needed. The approximation of these requirements is due to the fact that the board includes (custom) regulators. The board is completely dual mono, so it would be a waste to compromise channel separation by using a single power supply. But while I could have easily soldered (or have someone solder) four or five connectors, I certainly wasn't able to improvise a quality, dual mono PSU. Luckily, DACT was offering generic, if good quality, wall-wart PSUs which, while not being an ideal solution (as a matter of fact, DACT isn't offering them anymore, and is now proposing a dedicated high quality solution), were enough to put up and play this board and its CT101 line only sister.

Circuit-wise, DACT is somewhat less than effusive in information. The PCB and some components bear a NLE17 writing - if I understand correctly, NLE, a small Danish manufacturer, is producing the board, which has been available through them for some time in Scandinavian countries. A number of SMD components is to be found, and there are both ICs and discrete components, but no component designation is readable. The input stage is using discrete components because, according to the distributor, no ICs with a low enough noise floor are available. According to the specs, no output capacitor is used; the output presents a hardly worrying DC offset (3 mV) and an antirumble filter, implementing the IEC RIAA, is user selectable, which reduces the offset to zero. The manufacturer declares an EQ error below 5 hundredth of a dB; the RIAA is a hybrid split implementation, partially using a feedback loop, partially passive, both for noise - it's almost an obsession - and tolerance reasons. The user can select the already mentioned antirumble filter and the so-called "forgotten" RIAA time constant, the 3.18 uS one.

But, what else can the user select? Simply, pretty much everything can be useful to adapt this board to each and every available cartridge. Gain can be selected through a dip switch bank from 40 to 80 dB, to obtain a nominal 1V output from cartridges with output ranging from 5mV to 0.1 mV in 34 steps; load resistance can be set in about 20 steps ranging from 10 ohm to 47 Kohm; capacitance can be selected in 100 pF steps from 100 to 400 pF. Users can also install their own resistors or inductors. Such an ample range of set up options allows the user to optimise the coupling even with peculiar cartridges, such as the Decca London, and also allows to experiment and tweak with those cartridges for which the optimal values are declared. Output can be balanced or unbalanced, through the user's choice of connectors (usually XLR or RCA). Output impedance is lower than 1 ohm; maximum output voltage, in balanced mode, is 28.2 V; I have connected, with no problem, a passive preamp using a 2 meters cable from the phono stage to the passive and a 1.5 meters cable from the passive to the power amp. The S/N ratio is specified as 98 dB with gain set to the minimum, 71 dB with maximum gain selected; I haven't connected high output MM cartridges yet, but noise has never been a problem, even with the Ortofon SPU.

And how does it perform, sound-wise? Well, reading what I have written, you should know by now that I am not the most qualified one to tell you how it sounds compared with other, more well known phono stages; I am tempted to say that it performs as the solid state device it is, in a neutral and extended way, but with no detectable - at least by myself - grain or edginess. There are also improvement margins: I will soon share my thoughts and findings about the comparison between the old "stock" PSU and a personal (mine and my brother's, that is) creation I have been experimenting for a while, before a slight technical problem arose to force the interruption of its use. As a conclusion, I feel that the CT100 portrays unmercifully the cartridge, the tonearm/turntable system, the ability of the user/set-up technician to optimise the interfaces, and the quality of the record spinning. Low level resolution is quite outstanding: that's a mixed blessing, as every vinyl problem is exposed. However, as in all great analogue products I have experienced, noise tends to be separated, to happen in another plan to that of the musical event; it's present, but it doesn't interfere with music that much, quite like the guy at your left in the theatre, who coughs during a fortissimo: you are aware of him, but it doesn't diminish your musical experience that much. So, if you are trying to optimise your VTA, or if you want to discriminate if the recording was made with minimal miking or using a hundred of tracks, with the CT100 you will be able to do that; it will tell you, gently but firmly.

A couple of user impressions: I have a feeling it was created to be always left on - even if this flies in the face of the insistence of its distributor on battery PSUs, which can hardly leave it always powered - and, paradoxically, I feel it sounds better the higher the gain, but this could be a result of the gain characteristics of the rest of my listening chain; fact is, I tried, and I heard a definite advantage of a gain setting about 6/10 dB higher than strictly necessary (more than that is impractical because of the reduced volume settings available with a normal preamp).

This takes us back to the beginning of this writing: the astronomically priced digital front-end is now someone else's pride and joy, and now that I know that used records are definitely an option (sometimes they allow to experiment unknown music or performances at prices which, if you had to buy them on new CDs, you wouldn't even consider), and that many labels still do print major pop releases on LP (even if it's sometimes not that easy to purchase them), my vinyl collection grows at a 10x/15x speed compared to my CD collection. The difficult thing is to keep the real estate in control…

But is it worth to abandon the certainties of the digital system, which, once correctly placed and interfaced, is stable, in favour of the uncertainties, the number of parameters one must keep in control and the chances of going out of tune analogue brings with itself? I quite think it is: very high quality digital systems, compared with a mid class analogue set up, may have some advantages in low range extension and in consistency (no inner groove distortion or inner groove response frequency aberrations, for instance), but they can't stand a chance to the sense of truthfulness of vinyl replay, to the 3-D perception not only of the recording venue, but also of the entities, voices or instruments, moving around it. I haven't yet had the chance to evaluate high-resolution digital sources in my system, but my feeling is that the problem, now, is more of an ontological than of a technological one. The analogue system is simply more similar to how our hearing system works, it's not a case that, contrary to the PCM system, analogue distorts more as the level increases…