U Turn Pluto phono preamp

[topround]

Just bought my son a Pluto phono preamp from Uturn audio, made in USA.
This little preamp costs $89 and is fantastic, not just for $89, it is really good.
So good that anyone of us might be very happy with it as a main phono section, and if your phono section is old, it might be better than what you are using.
Very quiet with great natural tone it just renders records very very listenable.
Compared to my LCR phono preamp, it was very close, the LCR is tubed so does what tubes are capable of, delivering a little more air and space around instruments and the stage is taller and wider with the LCR. But for the money the Pluto is stupid good.

Fremer reviewed it on Analogplanet.com, and you can hear the files as it is compared to other budget phono preamps. I just followed his review and ordered one for my son, who does DJing in high school.

I am currently running it at 47k with a Ortofon Blue, but I can imagine running my MC with Slagle stepups and being very very happy.
In my experience even a budget phono preamp benefits from using step up transformers, especially good ones.
Kinda silly that the stepups cost 20X the price of the phono pre, but hey it works! You could save the money on some uber priced phono pre that may be better and invest that money into a better cartridge that definitly will be better.

At $89 I figure it costs about $45 to build, so these cheap parts must have really improved over the years because this thing sounds very very musical.
This is one item I am not thinking of resale value

If you are thinking of getting into vinyl here is the phono preamp for you, I know Mikey likes their turntable as well at $179 with a preinstalled cartridge!  You would have very respectable analog sound for under $300!!

[sleepyguy24]

Thanks for pointing this out. I got this U-Turn phono preamp to just mess around with. The cart I'm using this with is the Audio Technica AT150MLX cart on a refurbed Technics 1200 Mk2. So far so good. The sound is on par with the Pro-Ject Tube Box S with Ruby 12AX7 High Grade tubes in my system.

[richidoo]

That's a nice cart Dean. I enjoyed mine, it was fun to listen to. There is a great review of it in an old 'Sensible Sound' magazine. I think it said it was AT's best MM for North America, only one higher model in Japan, iirc.

The guy I sold it to let his toddler play with it, so kaput, now he's on a $40 AT cart. But there was no Pluto preamp available then, so I recommended TCC. Low cost was all that mattered, so Pluto would have been a good choice.