G'day all, being a vinyl record fan mated with a long term interest in DIY I have a lot of DIY MM phono stages over the years from different designs and from complete kits, ranging from very simple dual op designs to experimental transistor and FET designs and all of them are pretty good, but one kit that I built relatively recently was the Akitika 'phonoZ' design full kit which was for me quite a complex op amp design but is incredibly musical yet very good and 'solid' sounding.
The kit was actually supplied with NE5532 and NE5534 op amps but I opted with use my favourite OPA2134 wherever possible. I do like the sound of the OPA2134 over the NE553X series. The Akitika phonoZ has a number of circuit refinements not often seen in typical high quality DIY designs like filtering and input capacitance loading adjustments and a very low noise input circuit. On the basis of sound quality alone, I consider it one of the best, if not the best DIY moving magnet cartridge phono stages around! Regards, Felix.
