recip-riaa

The performance of bought or self-built preamplifiers for magnetic pickup cartridges is invariably not sufficiently well known. This is mainly due to the work involved in accurately measuring the amplitude response (RIAA or IEC curve), overdrive margin, distortion, signal-to-noise ratio and hum level. When the reproduction quality is not quite what it should be, the blame is by established tradition laid at the door of the disc manufacturer - or if his product is demonstrably above suspicion, at those of the cartridge or loudspeaker makers. The simple (and above all, electronic) preamplifier `will surely not be misbehaving?` The weighting network described in this article greatly simplifies the above-mentioned measurements. Despite its simplicity, using only five components, it will deliver a measurement signal that.is within 0.2dB of the standard RIAA cutting-curve. This should make it just about the smallest professional test instrument ever described….