The recent revival in vinyl and explosion of new turntables has spawned an equal number of new phono stages from the bargain basement models to the highly specialised audiophile units costing thousands. Nick Gorham from Longdog Audio noticed that the market was short on quality budget units, so he decided to design one to appeal to most newcomers to vinyl or those on limited funds. The result is a very straight forward moving magnet only unit costing £199. Ian Ringstead takes a listen. 

“As a budget unit the PH1 arrives in a simple cardboard box but well packaged to protect it and has a standard plug top switch mode 12v dc power supply. The unit is compact and comes in a nicely made aluminium case with very good quality phono sockets for the input and outputs. Nick usually designs very high-quality products with higher price tags than the PH1 but his experience in electronic design has allowed him to eek as much as he can out of the limited budget to produce a truly bargain-basement unit. Nick uses a combination of isolated and regulated power supply technology, along with second stage inductive filtering and a third stage of active regulation…”

Read the full review here