Stepping Up

An acquaintance was selling his Silvercore MC step up transformer for a reasonable price so I picked it up.

This is the bigger brother to my One to Ten transformer from the same company. The MC is fully silver wired. Specs are 100 ohms / 1:10 a universal transformer for pickups up to 40 ohms and a signal voltage of 250 to 750μV, which means it will work well with most of my MC carts, although the Hana could benefit from something with a lower input impedance. Silvercore actually do make a low impedance version of this, but I don’t intend on chasing that down. The Hana sounds excellent enough into this transformer anyway.

Their spiel: “The transformers used are nanocrystalline ring cores. The high resonance fq and the frequency-linear mapping make it possible to completely eliminate internal matching resistances, so that the music signal only passes through the transformer. This has the advantage that the music signal is not additionally attenuated and therefore louder than in conventional transformers. Of course, the transformers are encapsulated separately in MU metal for shielding to keep out interference from the transmitter. The wiring of the transformer takes place in the input symmetrical groundless, the output can be switched either floating or grounded (ground-lift switch). We wind our transformers in high-purity OFC-4N 99.99 silver wire, which is manufactured especially for our high demands.

The housing consists of a solid block of plastic into which the cutouts for the transformers are CNC milled. The housing design is optimal for mechanical damping of the transformers, partial oscillations are effectively suppressed. The housings are painted in black or white, other colors or piano finish are available for an additional charge.
The front and rear panels are made of highly polished stainless steel; the bezels are engraved by hand to underline our high standards.”

This model does seem to have a bit more ‘zing’ to the sound. Not in a bright way or anything, just a little more life. Certainly a good purchase. I like the ground lift switch as well, although I tend to rarely have issues with hum, luckily.

I may sell the One to Ten, or I may keep it. I always tend to regret selling off things like this.