Thanks - am I right in thinking that all it needs is a 15V power supply and a suitable case and you’re good to go? Guess it could even be mounted inside my turntable plinth if there was space. Would this take care of the capacitance needs of MM carts?
Sorry to bombard with questions, but just one more thing - I understand phono cartridges are inherently balanced, so could this be wired with balanced ins from the cart to balanced outs as well?
The reason I use the balanced buffer is that my ADC has 10K ohm input impedance on the balanced inputs and you need 47K for a MM cart to work correctly. As explained above by @sergeauckland carts are "kind of balanced / depends on cart and TT wiring/ etc" but if you use a buffer you can keep the leads from the cart to the buffer short, get the loading correct (less capacitance is usually better so short leads/ built into TT is great), and then after the buffer you have a true balanced connection to the ADC which is great for keeping noise down. In my case my ADC has plenty of gain on the balanced input (any balanced microphone input should have plenty of gain) so I don't need any extra gain from the buffer or a phono stage. I did ask Tom from Neurchrome about possibly adding gain to the buffer and he said with a couple of resistors changes 20 db is "easy" and with a little more work you could get more.