The Muffsy MC Head Amp is a dual mono active step-up preamp for LOMC cartridges. Still don’t know what it is? Join the club. Thankfully the board’s creator has a webpage explaining what this Amplifier is used for and why you might want one.
The basic gist of it is that turntables use one of two transducer types. A transducer being the thing that converts the grooves on the vinyl to electrical signals. The first type is called a moving magnet transducer and the other is a moving coil transducer. Muffsy is built “to use a low impedance output moving coil cartridge with your existing moving magnet phono stage”.
So why would you want to do this in the first place?
- Your favorite phono stage, or amplifier, only has MM input
- The quality of the MC input on your phono stage or amplifier isn’t good enough
- A step-up transformer is too expensive
- Your current MC phono stage lacks the settings you need
- You want to see what MC cartridges are all about, without having to buy a new and expensive phono stage
This is a board any audiophile will love, and there are detailed build logs of the project available over on the Muffsy hackaday.io page so if you are interested in the PCB design that goes into a board like this, give it a look.
