It is a joy listening to a ZYX cartridge playing music. Wonderful, mesmerising music. The work of Hisayoshi Nakatsuka is highly respected and well known to be among the best sounding MC Phono Cartridges in the world.
“In my opinion, ZYX designer Hisayoshi Nakatsuka has easily met his design goals for the 4D-G cartridge. Never have I heard a cartridge sound so unstrained when unraveling complex musical passages. Even when many different instruments are all playing at once with each competing for attention, the 4D-G remains composed and delivers each instrument with unprecedented vividness and authenticity.” – Frank Alles, Stereotimes.
The RCM Sensor Prelude is a phono preamplifier designed and built to the highest standards. Capable of extremely high gain of up to 76dB and combined with a very low noise floor the Sensor Prelude can amplify very low output MC cartridges with ease. Gain matching between cartridge and system is critical in order to achieve great sound, and the Sensor Prelude provides 7 selectable steps of gain to suit cartridge outputs of 0.3 mV to 5 mV. Both balanced (XLR) and unbalanced (RCA) outputs are provided. Easily accessible switches on the back panel allow the user to adjust cartridge load impedance, gain and mode of input stage (balanced or single-ended). The power supply is housed in a separate metal chassis to eliminate interference with the sensitive circuits in the phono preamplifier. It is fully balanced and has oversize filtering capacity and low output impedance. Product reviews are available here.