This is a review and detailed measurements of the ART USB Phono Plus preamplifier and digitizer. A member kindly donated money for me to buy this to test. It costs US $99.99.
The design is what you expect in this price range although good bit of controls are provided. As the name indicates, this phono stage has a digitizer allowing you to "rip" your LPs over USB to your computer:
The unit can also act like a normal ADC without the phono equalization/preamp. It seems to have a bunch of digital paths that I did not test. It didn't come with a power supply so I used USB power for data and power.
I got a kick out of the unit coming with a CD for the software! Fortunately it is USB class compliant so I could capture using that. I could not get it to play anything though. May have been pilot error.
ART USB Phono Plus ADC Measurements
I initially tested the unit as just an audio capture to see how good its ADC is. Here is our dashboard:
This is not half bad:
Same for noise for performance:
You can actually get a bit more performance if you stay below 2 volts input:
So plenty good enough for digitizing LPs.
ART USB Phono Plus Preamp Measurements
It is kind of tricky to know where to set the levels when using the digital output. I opted to go by when the clipping indicated just stayed green:
As you can tell, performance is heavily dominated by noise. I did my best to get the above performance. If you so much as breath on the unit SINAD can drop to as low as 20 dB! I played with different gains and nothing would produce more than 60 dB SINAD. Needless to say, we land near the bottom of the rankings:
RIAA equalization is actually decent:
Distortion is actually quite low:
Overload is tricky in digital capture pipeline. You have to balance the noise floor against potential clipping. So I ran the test at three different trim levels:
Looks like the noise penalty is actually small at -10 dB so I would go with that.
Conclusions
For the price there is plenty of functionality here and a serviceable ADC/digitizer. Mixing the digital with analog though has the potential for nasty ground loops which impacted my testing. So it is possible you can get better performance than I did. Assuming my results are middle of the road, we have too much noise here when using it as a phono stage.
I can't recommend the ART USB Phono Plus.
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As always, questions, comments, recommendations, etc. are welcome. Click here if you have some audio gear you want me to test.
Any donations are much appreciated using: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/how-to-support-audio-science-review.8150/
The design is what you expect in this price range although good bit of controls are provided. As the name indicates, this phono stage has a digitizer allowing you to "rip" your LPs over USB to your computer:
The unit can also act like a normal ADC without the phono equalization/preamp. It seems to have a bunch of digital paths that I did not test. It didn't come with a power supply so I used USB power for data and power.
I got a kick out of the unit coming with a CD for the software! Fortunately it is USB class compliant so I could capture using that. I could not get it to play anything though. May have been pilot error.
ART USB Phono Plus ADC Measurements
I initially tested the unit as just an audio capture to see how good its ADC is. Here is our dashboard:
This is not half bad:
Same for noise for performance:
You can actually get a bit more performance if you stay below 2 volts input:
So plenty good enough for digitizing LPs.
ART USB Phono Plus Preamp Measurements
It is kind of tricky to know where to set the levels when using the digital output. I opted to go by when the clipping indicated just stayed green:
As you can tell, performance is heavily dominated by noise. I did my best to get the above performance. If you so much as breath on the unit SINAD can drop to as low as 20 dB! I played with different gains and nothing would produce more than 60 dB SINAD. Needless to say, we land near the bottom of the rankings:
RIAA equalization is actually decent:
Distortion is actually quite low:
Overload is tricky in digital capture pipeline. You have to balance the noise floor against potential clipping. So I ran the test at three different trim levels:
Looks like the noise penalty is actually small at -10 dB so I would go with that.
Conclusions
For the price there is plenty of functionality here and a serviceable ADC/digitizer. Mixing the digital with analog though has the potential for nasty ground loops which impacted my testing. So it is possible you can get better performance than I did. Assuming my results are middle of the road, we have too much noise here when using it as a phono stage.
I can't recommend the ART USB Phono Plus.
----------
As always, questions, comments, recommendations, etc. are welcome. Click here if you have some audio gear you want me to test.
Any donations are much appreciated using: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/how-to-support-audio-science-review.8150/
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