Guide to uprgrading your vinyl source

We carry out a great deal of audio design and have had the luxury of listening to a vast array of equipment in different permutations. This page offers some advice on the many upgrade options available, with the aim of helping you make best use of your hard-earned system budget.

We are often asked questions about upgrade paths, such as:
"How much should I spend on a cartridge?"
"Is it worth rewiring a tonearm for a budget turntable?"
"Should I upgrade to the Ultra power supply system, or upgrade the tonearm or turntable?"
"What level of performance does the Upgrade Transformer add to my deck?"

Assessing upgrade priorities is not always easy, so we have tried to provide some guidance based on experience acquired over the years. Much depends on the level of performance you aspire to, your future plans (if any) and your budget. The following guidelines are inevitably a matter of opinion and judgement.

If you are using a vinyl front end, accepted wisdom is that you should break down your budget roughly as follows.

Vinyl based system split

Turntable / arm / cartridge / phono stage = 58% of budget
Amplifier = 21% of budget
Loudspeakers = 21% of budget

It should be noted that the phono stage is often of more significance than the amplifier as it contributes to over 70% of the amplification of a low output moving coil signal. So called "Good" phono stages in integrated amps are only good ralative to other integrated amps and rarely come close to a half decent external phono stage - the reason is simply that the phono stage in an integrated amp or pre-amplifier is having the life sucked out of it due to sharing the power supply with current hungry amplification stages. Having said this there are some atrocious stand alone phono stages at the £100 mark that will absolutely cripple any vinyl system - we refuse to put these on our web site even though they are in demand and recommended by unscrupulous or unknowledgable sales people.

CD based system split

The performance of CD players does not vary nearly as much as that of turntables, so the split is quite different. For example, if you have a £200 CD player you could easily apportion up to £1000 on the amp and £1000 on the speakers - the complete reverse of the thinking for vinyl.

If you are planning to upgrade over a period of time, you will split the budget based on your final investment in the system. Needless to say there are all sorts of exceptions to the above!

Breakdown of front end performance

Going into more detail, we would suggest the following breakdown in terms of contribution to vinyl front end performance. Please note that the price of a component does not does not necessarily guarantee performance. The following percentages indicate a component's contribution to the system, not necessarily its price.

Turntable = 47%
Tonearm = 30%
Cartridge = 8%
Phono stage = 15%

DC motor upgrade / arm upgrade / or new turntable?

The DC power supply system will add around £700's worth of performance to most turntables. This makes it a very good investment and far more cost-effective than upgrading a cartridge. Increasing the performance of a turntable is vastly more effective than cartridge upgrades. The DC motor upgrade is worth putting on any deck costing more than £300, unless you plan to spend around £1000 on a new deck. If your deck is around the £300 mark and you do not plan to spend more than around £250 on an upgrade, you should go for the DC motor kit and/or a Rega arm modification.

Performance Improvements Comparisons

The upgrades below are scored out of 100 in terms of relative performance. In an exercise of this nature one has to start at a 'base line' system. We have started with the very popular and highly regarded Rega Planar 3 or P3 with RB300 arm (about £300) and a £100 cartridge. Using this as a benchmark with a score of 0, the following scores give an idea of the improvement in performance that can be obtained with each item.

Some of the following items are outstanding in terms of value for money. All prices quoted are UK retail.

Resolution turntable £1979 = 100
Aurora turntable £970 = 91
Encounter tonearm£970 = 70
Silver tonearm £599 = 62

Ultra DC motor kit £570 = 38
Advanced DC motor kit £299 = 30
Upgrade Transformer for DC motor kit £175 = 20

Modifications to Origin Live & Rega arms
Structural modification £75 = 25
Rega internal rewire £70 =7
Rega external rewire £70 = 6
High conductivity phono plugs £20 = 0.5

Fully modified RB250 = 44
Fully modified RB300 = 38.5
(note that when the plastic rear stub is replaced on the RB250 it is a slightly better arm than the RB300)

GSP phono stage £119 (to replace an average phono stage included in a £700 amplifier) = 13
Upgrade from £100 cartridge to £200 cartridge = 4