It sells for $489 online from the company’s website ( Purists might cringe at the idea of converting analog to digital, but that is exactly what this phono preamp does. The same goes for anyone who likes to swap cartridges occasionally.Īnd wouldn’t it be nice to have the ability to grade records as to their quality and to improve their sound by diminishing the noise typically found on vinyl records? To address these issues, the Puffin Phono DSP by Parks Audio takes an entirely different approach. Collectors of antique records or 78s may also experience issues with properly equalizing them for the best sound. Some listeners, who like that warm tube sound, would love to have a preamp that delivers such sonic joy to the ears. Or it might be that a vintage record is somewhat noisy or worn and would benefit from some high-frequency noise attenuation. But some records that are overly accentuated in the high-frequency area, or whose bass has been unduly compressed for vinyl recording may need some help. What about equalization? Most phono preamps do an adequate job applying RIAA equalization to the signal path. Even if a phono stage has a gain control, it may still not have sufficient gain for a given cartridge.
Many inexpensive (less than $500) phono stages don’t have moving-coil (MC) cartridge capability and even moving-magnet cartridges and high output MC cartridges have many different output levels. In the past, personal experience with this problem caused me to resort to supplemental amplification to achieve good recording results with my system. Inadequate gain would cause a recording to be made at suboptimal volume levels decreasing the potential signal-to-noise available in a digital recording and reducing the overall volume compared to other digital audio files. This is especially important if the user wants to transfer records into a digital format. For example, the preamp’s gain may not be adequate for the cartridge output. In some cases, however, the end user would be unsatisfied with such a design. The purist approach would be to design a tube or solid-state phono preamplifier with components specified to reproduce a flat frequency response with low noise and distortion and good matching of impedance for cartridge loading and output.
The Puffin is basically a phono preamp designed to provide gain and equalization for any phono cartridge plugged into it, whether moving magnet, moving iron, or moving coil (see Photo 1). There were six additional controls added and several improvements to the 16 previous ones.īut let’s start at the beginning. But I was surprised at how drastically the function and performance of this device could change with a single firmware update. I knew that this was a possibility when I purchased this phono preamp last year. The business model for Shannon Parks, founder and chief engineer at Parks Audio LLC states: “Buy my phono stage, and it will be updated and improved constantly with simple firmware updates.” However, the upgrades were substantial, so I felt it best to start from scratch and re-evaluate the Puffin. And any future updates will be just as easy and with no investment in hardware required. A firmware update, which took about 10 minutes, was all it took to do the trick. Did I get a new, improved device from the manufacturer? Nope. I had already completed this article on the Puffin Phono DSP when I found out that it was almost completely obsolete.
Photo 1: The Puffin is a next-generation phono preamp with a programmable DSP to allow a wide range of gain settings.
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