Price:

Despite the proliferation of moving coil phono stages available today (both onboard and outboard), many people still believe that a good step-up transformer and a moving magnet phono stage is the best way to handle a moving coil cartridge. If you want to use a valve phono stage with a moving coil cartridge, a step-up transformer is really the only way to get an acceptable performance and signal/noise ratio. So, why are there so few moving coil step-up transformers available? Because they're difficult to design and expensive to produce. However, when done properly, the performance is unsurpassed.
The Rothwell MC Step-Up Transformer is now available to give superb performance with low output MC cartridges (in the range 300uV - 600uV). Bandwidth is wide and flat with particular attention paid to transient response. Mu-metal screening keeps external magnetic interference to the absolute minimum to give the best signal/noise ratio possible.
Voltage gain is 24dB