Allnic H-1201

Phono EQ Amp

Many audio reviewers would have you believe that high-end components designed and built by a single person are often distinctively individual… sometimes, even, verging on ‘quirky’. And it’s products such as the Allnic Audio H-1201 Phono EQ Amplifier, designed by Kang Su Park, that prove there’s more than a grain of truth in that theory.

The equipmenT

Before getting onto the ‘distinctively individual’ elements of the H-1201’s design, let’s get the nuts and bolts out of the way. And they are ‘nuts and bolts’, because there are certainly no ‘bells and whistles’ on this Spartan phono stage. As a phono stage, it has inputs for both moving-coil and moving-magnet cartridges. The voltage gain of the MM section is fixed, at 38dB, as is the impedance (47kΩ). The voltage gain of the MC section is variable, as it’s able to be switched between an indicated 22dB, 26dB, 28dB and 32dB. However, because the MC section includes a fixed gain stage with a voltage gain of 40dB, the actual gains are 62dB, 66dB, 68dB and 72dB. When you switch gain on the MC section, you also necessarily switch input impedances, which Allnic confusingly labels as ×13, ×20, ×26 and ×40, stating only that the highest input impedance the MC section offers is 280Ω. In fact, according to Kang Su Park, the corresponding impedances are 29Ω, 69Ω, 117Ω and 278Ω. In each case these are suitable for cartridges ‘up to 29Ω,’ ‘up to 69Ω’, ‘up to 117Ω’ and ‘up to 278Ω’.

The construction of the transformers (which are made in-house at Allnic’s facility in Korea) is what gives rise to the company’s name, because they use cores made from Permalloy, which is a Nickel-Iron compound developed by Gustav Elmen ( Ref 1) when he was working at Bell Laboratories, and Allnic says that the word ‘Allnic’ is a contraction of the words ‘All Nickel Core’. This confused me because Permalloy not pure Nickel at all, but a mix of Nickel and Iron. Notwithstanding, Park is apparently a great admirer of Elmen’s work; he even includes a dedication in the Owners’ Manual for the H-1201 that says: ‘ Allnic is grateful to Mr G.W. Elmen of Western Electric for inventing Permalloy for transformer core use, and in so doing, providing an enormous service to recorded music listeners everywhere.’ Permalloy is most useful because of its extremely high permeability, but its other highly desirable magnetic characteristics, including low coercivity, almost no magnetostriction—and its significant anisotropic magnetoresistance— made it the ideal material to use in tape recorders, which is presumably the application for which Allnic is lauding Elmen.