Bill,
I've never wired one of these up so I'm only able to pass along the "official" wiring diagrams. But since the DIN connectors sometimes gets used for both input and output wiring, it does make sense that they'd use a common ground. But you won't know for sure until the tonearm arrives and you can measure it for yourself.
The phono shoot out was interesting although I got a bit of listening overload after a while. All the phono stages sounded good except perhaps for a Wright phono stage at the end which was a bit too rolled off for my tastes. The other all tube phono stage from Wavestream sounded lovely with a wide soundstage and great articulation. Some people felt it wasn't the last word in accuracy but it sure did sound nice.
The ONO phono stage sounded good to me, as it should since I built it
. I was using it with the step up transformer which I brought to your place earlier this year. The thing that people commented on was that the bass was a bit light, but I think that was mainly due to not having time to optimize the cartridge loading. The Shelter cartridge likes 100ohm loading and we were pretty far off of that with my phono stage. In my system, playing with the loading is really critical for getting the right overall balance, but we didn't do much of that yesterday.
The Curcio phono stage sounded good as well but also had somewhat light weight bass. It could have been because the speakers had moved around a bit for the listening event and they hadn't yet been fully dialed in.
---Gary
