Hi all

Some of you mention the RIAA equalization curve.
This will need to be dealt with if your pickup is Magnetic, moving coil or moving iron (magnet) like Sure, Ortifon, etc. these will also need a pre amp as the output is low a few mv. The RIAA treatment is included in pre amps made for this purpose, in hi fi amps or can be bought as free standing units to give you an equalized output at a higher level for driving what ever. If you use a magnetic cartridge.

However those using ceramic pick up cartridges, you don’t need to worry about RIAA Eq or preamps.
As they are a much higher impendence and output often 100mv to 1volt .
The eq is not required because the ceramic element compensates for the recording curve.

This means that if you don’t use RIAA eq when using a magnetic pickup it will sound thin and toppy no bass. Where as a ceramic will give you an already flatter output across the range. Into its correct impedance.

The above all assumes that you are feeding the above cartridges to their correct input impedance, that is :normally 47k moving iron(magnet),
Moving coil are often much lower impedance and need to go through a transformer to bring them up to a 47k input.
Ceramic cartridges req a much higher impedance 1M to 2M to perform as above.

Strangely, and confusing for some folks if you feed a high impedance ceramic cartridge into a 47k input the mismatch causes its output to not be flat
In fact it would be all top and no bass so you can bring it back on line by using RIAA EQ. But you would overload a magnetic cartridge input because of the ceramic cartridge high output

Have fun
Mike

Last edited by Mike Head; 09/17/19 03:36 AM.
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