MUSICAL FIDELITY M3X VINYL phono stage

The best gift you can give your turntable is a high-quality phono stage which will treat its output with respect. Musical Fidelity delivers a fine example in its new M3x Vinyl. “Listen particularly to the way John Densmore’s cymbals cut through the mix o

Give your turntable a high-quality phono stage which will treat its output with respect.

The Musical Fidelity M3x Vinyl phono stage is a first for Musical Fidelity in more than one way. To begin with it’s the first phono stage in the company’s M3 Series, which Musical Fidelity promotes using the catch-phrase “Great-looking, superb-sounding hi-fi doesn’t have to cost a fortune.”

The M3x Vinyl is also the first Musical Fidelity component to be built entirely in countries in the European Union, rather than its long-term manufacturing base in Taiwan. In 2018 Anthony Michaelson sold Musical Fidelity to his good friend Heinz Lichtenegger, the owner of Pro-Ject, who with his wife Jozefína (who owns European Audio Team) has multiple manufacturing facilities in the EU. So the M3x Vinyl is the first Musical Fidelity product to be built in one of these facilities. It remains to be seen whether Lichtenegger and his team will start manufacturing other Musical Fidelity components in the EU as well.

The M3x Vinyl is also almost the first phono stage Musical Fidelity has manufactured that does not use op-amps (the first was the M6x Vinyl), instead using discrete components — separate resistors, capacitors, transistors and so on — in the place of op-amps. This is rather the opposite of what’s happening in other hi-fi components, so we asked Musical Fidelity the reason.

The answer, according to the company is that: “Countless hours of listening tests have shown us that even the very best op-amps do not tend to be so neutral, natural, dynamic or vivid — all characteristics of the Musical Fidelity sound.

For that reason, we’re rediscovering our passion for traditional, discrete designs.”

Equipment

The front panel of the M3x Vinyl phono stage pretty much gives away exactly what features it has inside, because they’re all printed right there on the panel itself. You can see that the unit will accommodate both moving-magnet and moving-coil cartridge but, despite the provision of two push-buttons to select between them, there’s only a single phono input on the rear. So you can connect either the one or the other, but not both simultaneously.

If you are using a moving-magnet cartridge, the six push-buttons just to the right of the two MM/ MC selector buttons allow you to choose what load capacitance will be presented to your cartridge: 50pF, 100pF, 200pF, 300pF, 350pF or 400pF. Whichever of these load capacitance values you select, the value of the load impedance will remain fixed at 47kohms. The gain of the MM section is fixed at 40dB.

If you are using a moving-coil cartridge, then the six push-buttons at the far right of the front panel allow you to choose the load impedance that will be presented to your cartridge: 25 ohms, 80 ohms, 100 ohms, 400 ohms, 800 ohms or 1.2k ohms. The gain of the MC section is fixed at 60dB.

Between the MM and MC load-setting buttons are two other buttons, the left of which is labelled ‘IEC’ and the right ‘+6dB’. What the IEC button does is switch the M3x Vinyl’s equalisation curve from being a standard RIAA curve to an IEC-RIAA curve. As for that ‘+6dB’ switch, it activates an additional amplifier

stage that adds an extra 6dB of gain to increase the voltage at the M3x Vinyl’s output terminals (unbalanced, using RCA connectors).

The ‘Power’ button is rather curious. It’s not an On/Off switch, instead switching the M3x Vinyl between ‘On’ and ‘Standby’. Musical Fidelity’s literature claims the M3x Vinyl is fitted with “a new proprietary power supply solution that has zero standby power consumption. Absolutely zero! It is a super green product and we are sure there isn’t any other product in existence with an ecological standby function like this.” This is, of course, impossible and therefore not entirely true. The Musical Fidelity M3x Vinyl does draw power in standby, but not from the mains supply. It has a 3V CR2030 battery inside, which ensures that whatever cartridge type, load and gain settings you were using when you switched the M3x Vinyl off will be restored when you next switch it on.

The PCBs inside the M3xVinyl take up so little space that Musical Fidelity could, theoretically, have made the chassis smaller, but its size has allowed the designers to position all power supply components on a separate PCB as far away from the primary circuitry as possible. They’ve also used a totally shielded low-core saturation toroidal transformer to step down the 240V mains voltage to the amplifier’s rail voltage. While Musical Fidelity hasn’t used any op-amps in the signal path, the circuitry is not, as the company claims, “entirely discrete” because the PCBs do contain integrated circuits, including an ARM micro-controller.

Worthy of special mention round the back is the all-essential turntable ground post: a full-on brass screw fitting not unlike a speaker terminal, and much better than the plastic/arrow prong terminals often provided.

Performance

First up for our listening was a brand-new LP of an intimately-familiar album — the 45rpm version of ‘L.A. Woman’ by The Doors, pressed by Analogue Productions. It’s a part of a six-disc set cut by the legendary Doug Sax using the original analogue masters.

One outstanding musician on Love Her Madly is bass player Jerry Scheff, who once played for Elvis Presley. Listening via the Musical Fidelity M3x Vinyl we could appreciate even more how he manages to be totally inventive, with unusual bass lines that drive the song and create an underlying pulse, while all the time containing the song’s break-neck tempo (one of Scheff’s jobs was to make sure keys man Ray Manzarek didn’t play too fast!). The M3x Vinyl revealed the tone of his bass better than we’ve ever heard, and also delivered the best stereo image we’ve heard from this track, given that it was recorded wide, with instruments played mostly left and right, rather than spread organically across the sound stage.

The spacey intro to L.A. Woman was served up beautifully by the M3x Vinyl, which made the bass and drums intro even more exciting, with the excitement increased even more by how well the M3x Vinyl handled the crisp drumming of John Densmore. Listen particularly to the way his cymbals cut through the mix on this track: you won’t hear that using a lesser phono stage! Listen also to the repeated riff after the rhythm change at 3.02 and how the Musical Fidelity’s channel balance is so exact that you can hear the almost imperceptible difference in arrival times from left and right speakers.

A real test for any phono cartridge — or any phono stage for that matter — is the magical soundscape presented by The Alan Parsons Project’s album ‘I Robot’. It was absolutely captivating the minute the stylus dropped into the title track. The vividness of the orchestral colouring on this track was reproduced blindingly well by the Musical Fidelity M3x Vinyl.

The Parsons link dictated that ‘The Dark Side of the Moon’ just had to be the next album on the audition list. Great sound has that ability to relax the soul, and the sound from the Musical Fidelity had us totally relaxed from the get-go. There’s an amazing amount going on in Speak to Me/Breathe, while on the following track, On the Run, listen to the pan that starts at 1.36 and then the panoply of effects that follows, and hear how the imaging ability of the M3x Vinyl throws everything into stark relief. Flipping the disc, Money similarly revealed the M3x Vinyl’s amazing ability to separate the left and right channels while still maintaining a crisp stereo image.

During every album, we experimented with the RIAA curve setting, switching back and forth between each, and rather confoundingly found that we preferred the IEC-RIAA setting every time. It wasn’t because it cut out rumble, because on all but one of the LPs we played there was no recorded rumble, and our system doesn’t have any rumble to remove either. The IEC-RIAA just sounded better.

Conclusion

If you use a high-quality phono cartridge, it is essential to also use a high-quality external phono stage if you’re to extract the best performance from it. The Musical Fidelity M3x Vinyl phono stage is certainly a one-trick pony, in that it only does one thing and accommodates only one phono cartridge, but as Paul Simon says in his song of that name, “it turns that trick with pride”.