is the Bugle PCB designed in any specific way, other than to lay out everything in a neat and orderly way?
Yes, it is extremely specific. It may look orderly, but that's merely coincidental and the result of careful placement of signal routing. In order to make the circuit tight with short traces and low capacitance nodes, you have to jamb the components together, and the only way this happens is when they line up. Hence, the orderly appearance follows function. Not the other way around. At least with my boards. There are many examples in the hi-fi world where it is all about visuals, not signals. You can best see this in my layouts by looking at just the traces, no components.
I also choose to sacrifice crosstalk in favor of stability and sonics. Considering you get maybe 30dB to 40dB channel separation out of a cartridge, there is no point having 80dB worth of channel separation in the phonostage. I purposely sacrifice this parameter in order to improve other more significant ones. The result is no loss in performance for crosstalk, just a lower number on the spec sheet. Hence, you will see dual opamps with each side of the chip operating on a different channel. Compare this to what most other designers do, and that's to put subsequent gain sections of one channel into a dual opamp. The danger is that you get parasitic feedback, often positive! That's right, the output of one pin on the chip is 100 to 1000 times greater than another pin. What you get is unwanted feedback and HF instability. This also happens via the supply rails of the chip. The situation is even worse with dual triodes.
So in short, it's not about beauty, but purpose.
could you just swap out R17/R35 instead?
Yup.
I just built one from scratch
Unfortunately, you'll never get the performance possible with the circuit board.
jh
