The CubiQ MC RIAA is a combination of the CubiQ RIAA and the CubiQ MC in one package!

Note: If you have the CubiQ RIAA you can upgrade it to become the CubiQ MC RIAA simply by adding the Dynaton MC Add-On Module – and if you have the CubiQ MC you can upgrade it to the CubiQ MC RIAA by adding the CubiQ RIAA board.

The CubiQ MC RIAA is in fact more than 30 years old… What? Yes, the CubiQ MC RIAA is a direct descendent of the High-End RIAA and MC Preamplifier that some of our Dynaton founders were doing some 30 years ago..

The MC Preamplifier features 44x Low-Impedance Transistors that form a Low-Noise preamplifier capable of amplifying the very small music signal that comes from a Low-Output Moving Coil Cartridge. The MC Preamplifier is coupled in a differential amplifier design with modern SMD (Surface Mounted Devices) Transistors in parallel to reduce the noise to almost the least possible. This allows you to use even the lowest output MC Cartridges with the CubiQ MC RIAA with satisfactory results. It is impossible to have a completely “noise-free” reproduction from any MC Preamplfier but with a sensible design as the CubiQ MC you comes close to the theoretical limits of what can be achieved with the Transistors. The CubiQ MC is a far more advanced design than most MC Preamplifiers. If you compare different designs you will often find only a few Transistors in most MC Preamplifiers – but in the CubiQ MC you find no less than 44x Low-Impedance Transistors which reduces the noise by (theoretically additionally) 6dB compared to a simpler design. It may not seen that much is won but when you consider that the music signal from a Low-Output Moving Coil Cartridge is amplified by some 1.000x, it is easy to understand that focus on lowest possible noise in the design is truly an advantage!

The RIAA part of the CubiQ MC RIAA is also 100% build from discrete components. Instead of the typical OP-AMP’s it features another 44x Transistors to further amplify the sensitive signal fromeither the output of the CubiQ MC (when using a Low-Output MC Cartridge) or directly from the Turntables (when using a MM Cartridge or a High-Output MC Cartridge).

There are no OP-AMP’s in the signal path of the CubiQ MC RIAA! A discrete design with real Transistors is by far superior in Sound Quality to an OP-AMP based circuit – even though you can nowadays design very good High-Performance OP-AMP based Audio circuits.

The CubiQ MC RIAA has no coupling-capacitors at all… All Audio Products are influenced by the electronics components that has been used to manufacture the product with – and one of the most problematic electronics components are capacitors. They unfortunately have a direct impact upon the Sound Quality and it is very difficult to find truly good capacitors – and if you manage to find a really good one, it will result in sky-rocketing of the materials costs meaning that your price will be much higher than good is. So at Dynaton we decided that the best coupling capacitor is no capacitor in the Audio signal path.

So just like all other Dynaton CubiQ Series Products the CubiQ MC RIAA uses DC-Servo circuits to avoid any DC-offset on the output of the product. The advantage of a DC-Servo circuit is that is automatically adjusts the DC-offset to “zero” and is not dependent of manual adjustments such as is the case by DC-coupling. Furthermore the DC-Servo is located in the Feedback Loop of the Amplifiers and that means that the DC-Servo circuit hence has a minimum influence upon the Sound Quality – and the influence is far less than what would be experienced if you were using the World’s best capacitor in case you could afford to buy it? Compared to DC-coupling (that also is without any coupling-capacitors) the DC-Servo is in our opinion a better solution because all electronics (and we mean all regardless of price, brand and type) will “drift” with temperature and age – and this means that a DC-coupled Amplifier will not be at “zero” offset apart from when you have the same temperature and the product is still new. A DC-Servo will automatically adjust the offset all the time and this with far less influence of temperature and you do not have problems with aging. So we believe that DC-Servo is the best and most viable solution to avoid annoying “clicks” and “scratching sounds” in High-Performance Audio Electronics.

The RIAA circuit in the CubiQ MC RIAA is basically a filter that reduce the sound level of the high frequencies (-20dB @ 20.000Hz) and amplify the low frequencies (+20dB @ 20Hz *).

* The New RIAA standard does in fact specify that the level should be -3dB @ 20Hz (hence +17dB instead of 20dB) but Dynaton has decided not to comply with New RIAA as this is a silly specification in our minds that only was made to accommodate poor “plastic-turntables” in the mid 1980’s. The New RIAA has inferior Sound Quality to the original RIAA so we keep the original RIAA so give you the best possible Sound Quality from your LP Records!

This can be achieved by a couple of different ways but Dynaton is using the Passive RIAA principle. This have several advantages amongst one is that the amplifier modules are completely linear whereas this is not the case for any other type of RIAA correction. A Passive RIAA is however the most difficult solution to design as it puts extraordinary technical requirements to the amplifier modules quality and low-noise – but at the end of the day the Passive RIAA has both the best Precision and the best Sound Quality.

An Analog filter circuit cannot be designed without capacitors – but the advantage of the CubiQ Passive RIAA design is that the RIAA correction capacitors are all in parallel to the direct audio signal. This does reduce the capacitors influence upon the Sound Quality but we have still decided to use the best viable capacitors for the CubiQ Passive RIAA circuit. So we use High-Precision Polypropylene that is the best viable material for audio capacitors with low negative influence upon the Sound Quality. The precision of the CubiQ MC RIAA is 0.2dB which is as close as it possible can be meaning that you hear exactly what is in the LP Record grooves – and with a good MC Cartridge you will hear more music with your CubiQ MC RIAA than you probably did expect was possible from LP Records.