What you like to take your turntable and the fidelity of your vinyl playback to a new level?

Music To My Ear has done the "heavy lifting," allowing you to achieve this heightened quality by bundling together a Denon DL-103R Moving Coil Cartridge, the proper headshell depending on your needs, a Bellari MT502 Step-Up Transformer, and an Andover SpinStage Phono Stage. With these four items in concert, you'll have all you need to help your vinyl sound better than ever before!

Bundle Details

DENON DL-103R SPECIFICATIONS

The DL-103R is the evolved and reengineered version of Denon's original Moving Coil Cartridge. Designed to bring all your vinyl favorites to life for years to come.

BELLARI MT502 MU SPECIFICATIONS

The new Bellari MT502 mu is a stereo, moving coil step up transformer that raises the low level of a moving coil cartridge up to a moving magnet level. Making your moving coil cartridge compatible with your phono preamp.

(From Stereophile Magazine) “The Bellari MT502 transformer: Housed in Bellari’s familiar powder-coated red chassis, the MT502 step-up transformer features hand-wound coils, gold-plated inputs and outputs, and a ground lift. The MT502 produced a quiet background, sharp transients, and taut, fast, well-defined bass. A perfect match to Bellari’s VP130 moving-magnet phono preamp. (Vol.33 No.11)”

On Stereophile’s ‘Recommended Components’ list in 2012, 2013, 2014, 2015… OK, you can see a pattern here.

The MT502 is all hand-built in the USA. The MT502 is as much art as it is sonic perfection.

Moving coil cartridges should be stepped up with transformers to get the best sound quality. The issue with almost all phono preamps that claim they are MM and MC compatible is that most are MM phono preamps that in the MC setting just boost the gain. This can create issues with sound quality. The fact of the matter is, MC cartridges need a transformer to be at their best. If you look at very high end systems, they all use step up transformers.

At Bellari we don’t just boost the gain of our phono preamps and then call them MC compatible. We build a proper step-up transformer the MT502 to truly make your MC cart sound the way it should.

With a selectable turns ratio you no longer need to match your cart with a step up transformer. The MT502 will match almost any cart with its selectable turns ratio switch. Its like having two step up transformers in one unit. The 12:1 is designed to work with carts like the Denon DL103 or 103R or similar. The 30:1 is designed to work with carts that need more gain/level.

The “mu” stands for Mu Metal as that is the new metal now encasing the 2019 MT502 transformers. MU Metal is one of the best shielding materials known. The new transformers are hand wound, potted, encased in MU Metal and then placed into a copper chassis that has been gold plated. This is all done one at a time, by hand.

ANDOVER SPINSTAGE SPECIFICATIONS

Vinyl playback of exceptional clarity

Don’t simply connect a turntable, honor it with a phono preamp stage of uncommon quality. Ready for both Moving Magnet and Moving Coil cartridges, the SpinStage™ phono preamp delivers a host of circuitry refinements and a range of adjustments that would make some expensive preamplifiers jealous. No wonder Ian White of eCoustics named it an Editor’s Choice.

Exactly the right impedance

Although phono inputs are gaining popularity, not all audio systems have them. Of those that do, only a few accommodate low-output Moving Coil (MC) cartridges as well as Moving Magnet (MM). And only a very few have the robust input impedance options to exactly match the needs of your particular MM cartridge. The SpinStage preamp provides four separate MM input impedance settings, and a staggering 15 separate MM capacitance options. You’re not simply connecting a turntable; you’re eliciting its full performance.

True Moving-Coil gain stage

Low-output Moving Coil cartridges are highly-prized by audiophiles. But most value-priced phono preamps accommodate MC cartridges by simply increasing the gain on their Moving Magnet inputs, an approach that increases background noise. In dramatic contrast, the SpinStage preamp incorporates a dedicated Moving Coil gain stage. So, you’ll hear true Moving Coil performance – against a background of satisfying silence.

Highly refined circuitry

As the lowest-level signals among component interconnects, the magnetic cartridge outputs are exquisitely sensitive to even tiny amounts of noise and distortion. The SpinStage preamp protects your music with isolated dual-mono circuitry, a DC servo circuit and a switchable subsonic filter (20 Hz, 12 dB/octave) to keep turntable rumble under control.