Mola Mola Lupe

Prior to spending time with the Mola Mola Lupe, my knowledge of the company was fairly limited. I had heard of the brand, but mostly in relation to the Tambaqui DAC, which has earned an enviable reputation amongst digital enthusiasts. Beyond that, it was a brand I was aware of rather than one I had any direct experience with.
A couple of years ago when loudspeaker designer John DeVore chose to use a Makua preamplifier, fitted with its optional phono stage, as the analogue front end in one of his demonstration rooms at an international audio show, my interest was piqued. This was the control centre driving his compelling Komuro 300B amplifier (that continues to haunt my mind). He later spoke very highly of its performance on a Farcebook post I made. John always constructs systems for his show appearances very carefully. Every component is chosen because it contributes to the final result, and there are no shortage of exceptional phono stages available. If someone like JD is happy to trust that circuit in front of his loudspeakers, it says something.
Even so, I’d never actually heard a Mola Mola component in my own system, fortunately for me that changed when I was able to spend some time with the Lupe recently.

Mola Mola is a Dutch company, founded in 2012 by Bruno Putzeys and Jan-Peter van Amerongen, both of whom had previously worked together at Hypex. While plenty of audio companies like to present themselves as innovators, Mola Mola occupies an unusual position in the industry. It wasn’t built around marketing or nostalgia, but around engineering. Its founders are people who have fundamentally influenced modern amplifier design, which gives them a credibility that few manufacturers can genuinely claim.
Bruno Putzeys is widely regarded as one of the most important amplifier designers of the past few decades. Alongside Mola Mola, he’s also been instrumental in companies such as Kii Audio and Grimm Audio, both of which have reputations for combining advanced engineering with uncompromising audio performance.
The first Mola Mola products, a line preamplifier and Class D power amplifier using Ncore technology, debuted at the Munich High End Show in 2012. Since then the company has been expanding its range, always with an emphasis on technical excellence rather than chasing trends. The Lupe phono stage continues that philosophy, taking an approach that is as engineered as you would expect from the people behind it.

The Lupe isn’t a completely new design. It evolved from the Makua’s optional phono board, taking the same underlying circuit and housing it in its own dedicated chassis with its own power supply and an amazing degree of configurability.

The first thing that separates the Lupe from most competitors is its flexibility. Almost every parameter can be adjusted from the couch. Gain, loading and capacitance are all configured through the app, and each cartridge can have its own preset. There are no banks of fiddly DIP switches to decipher and no need to pull the rack apart every time you decide to experiment.
The height of convenience for a lazy arse I guess, but also a considerable strength in day to day use.

I own rather more cartridges than any sensible person probably should, and I have an unfortunate habit of changing between them as often as the wind direction sees fit. One evening I might be listening to a modern moving coil, the next an old Ortofon SPU through a step-up transformer, and then something completely different the following day, just because I can. With the Lupe, each cartridge has its own preset waiting to be recalled.

My listening covered several different approaches. First, I used it directly with moving coil cartridges, taking advantage of its extensive internal adjustment options for gain, loading and whatnot. This alone makes the Lupe an extremely capable phono stage, allowing each cartridge to be properly optimised without the need for external devices. The ability to quickly change settings and store different configurations made experimenting with different cartridges simple and enjoyable.

I also spent considerable time using the Lupe with my main step-up transformers, the Kondo CFz and the Auditorium 23 T2. The Kondo remains one of the finest step-up transformers I have heard, bringing an effortless sense of flow and tonal richness while never sounding slow or overly romantic. The Lupe complements it beautifully, providing an exceptionally quiet and transparent foundation while allowing the character of the transformer and cartridge combination to remain intact.

The Auditorium 23 T2 is my default for my EMT cartridges. EMTs have an immediacy and sense of drive that make them endlessly enjoyable, and the T2 preserves that character wonderfully and allows for a compelling rendition of tonal density. The Lupe simply gets out of the way, allowing both transformer and cartridge to express themselves. It never feels as though the phono stage is trying to steer the presentation in a particular direction, which is exactly what a reference component should do.

The Lupe’s flexibility extends beyond cartridge loading. Multiple replay equalisation curves are available alongside standard RIAA, making it particularly attractive for anyone with early mono pressings or historic recordings. That could easily become a gimmick, but here it feels like part of a genuinely well thought out design. It isn’t trying to be clever for the sake of it. It just provides the tools that serious record collectors may actually use. It is like my old Sentec, once you find the right curve it just sort of locks in and sounds right. It’s easy to fiddle around and use the settings almost like a de-facto EQ, which is fine, in fact I often found myself bumping up the treble response a notch compared to standard RIAA, it just sounded a bit more open that way. The app is so cool. Stable and quick, and clear and easy to use. Being able to name presets was fantastic. I like the contrast of ultra modern technology and arcane methods of playback converging. I should mention it comes with a pretty slick remote to switch between presets, although I just used the app on my ipad or phone.

Of course, features like this only matter if the sound justifies them.
What is apparent from the get go is the sheer lack of noise. Not silence in the sense of an artificially damped presentation, but the absence of electronic haze, small details emerge without any effort.

Over the past few weeks I’ve been listening to as much vinyl as time has allowed. The Lupe wasn’t subjected to a carefully curated playlist of audiophile favourites. Instead, it became part of my everyday listening. Records that have found their way onto the platter include Iron Maiden’s self-titled debut, Black Sabbath’s first album, Anathema’s Serenades and the magnificent Pentecost III EP, alongside everything from Heilung and Sangre de Muerdago to My Dying Bride. That diversity of music highlighted one of the Lupe’s greatest strengths. It never seemed to favour one genre over another. Whether it was the raw energy of early heavy metal, the bleak atmosphere of doom, or expansive folk and ritualistic soundscapes, the Lupe stepped aside and let each record sound like itself, it never gave the impression that its trying to impress with exaggerated resolution. Instead, it removes obstacles between the cartridge and the music.

One record that demonstrated this particularly well was My Dying Bride’s The Thrash of Naked Limbs. It is not an audiophile recording, nor does it pretend to be, but the Lupe refused to flatten it into a wall of indistinct distortion. The guitars retained texture, the bass remained purposeful and Aaron Stainthorpe’s vocal occupied a believable position within the mix. Most importantly, the bleak atmosphere that defines the EP remained completely intact. The Lupe didn’t attempt to sanitise the recording or make it prettier than it really is, it just presented it honestly.

Another My Dying Bride record that repeatedly found its way onto the platter was Symphonaire Infernus et Spera Empyrium. Pressed as a 45 rpm 12-inch EP, it consistently sounds like a far more expensive production than many listeners expect. There is a tendency to dismiss early doom metal releases as crude recordings, yet this pressing demonstrates exactly what careful mastering and the advantages of the 45 rpm format can achieve.

Through the Lupe, the scale of the recording became immediately apparent. The guitars carried tremendous weight without becoming congested, Rick Miah’s drums had genuine physical impact and Martin Powell’s violin floated through the soundstage with a delicacy that is often lost with lesser phono stages. Rather than dissolving into a dense wall of sound, individual layers remained intelligible while still combining into the huge, oppressive atmosphere the music demands. It made me appreciate how good the record actually is compared with the cd.

At the opposite end of the musical spectrum sat the Sangre de Muerdago / Monarch split LP. Sangre de Muerdago’s As Voces da Pedra combines drone, folk and traditional instruments, including hurdy-gurdy and the square drum of Peñaparda, into something deeply atmospheric. The Lupe reproduced the texture of those instruments beautifully, allowing natural resonances and decays to develop against an exceptionally quiet background.
Turning the record over to Monarch’s Immortelles revealed a completely different challenge. Dense, immersive layers can easily become an amorphous cloud through lesser equipment, but the Lupe maintained remarkable composure. It didn’t dissect the music into analytical fragments, yet individual layers remained easy to follow. The result was immersive rather than confusing, preserving exactly the ethereal atmosphere the recording is intended to create.

Another record that really highlighted the Lupe’s strengths was Heilung’s Lifa Iotungard. Capturing a Heilung performance is never simply about reproducing music. It is about conveying an event. The chants, layered percussion, horns and vast dynamic swings combine to create something that feels closer to a ritual than a conventional concert.
Through the Lupe, the scale of that performance was conveyed effortlessly. The enormous acoustic space of the venue opened up well beyond the loudspeakers, while the audience became a natural part of the recording rather than an indistinct background wash. Percussion carried physical impact, with each drum strike expanding into the venue before decaying naturally into silence. The deep rhythmic pulse retained tremendous authority, and there was never any sense of congestion as the arrangement became increasingly complex.
Most impressive was the way the Lupe preserved the atmosphere of the performance. Heilung deliberately blurs the line between music, theatre and ceremony, and lesser equipment can reduce that experience to little more than impressive sound effects. Here, the ritualistic nature of the performance remained completely intact. There was a real sense of standing within the audience, surrounded by the performance rather than merely observing it. It’s a recording that encourages listening to the entire album in a single sitting, not because of hi-fi spectaculars, but because the Lupe captured the sheer scale, space and emotional impact of the event with conviction.

These records could scarcely be more different, but they all demonstrated the same underlying quality. The Lupe doesn’t editorialise, it allows each recording to retain its own identity, whether that identity is raw, beautiful, oppressive or expansive.
Bass throughout was exceptionally well controlled, with excellent pitch definition and convincing weight. The midrange remained open and free from obvious colouration, allowing voices and acoustic instruments to sound natural rather than highlighted, high frequencies extended effortlessly without becoming brittle or etched.
Large dynamic swings never caused the presentation to harden, while densely layered music retained its structure. There was no sense of the phono stage struggling to keep pace.

That’s what impressed me most really. The Lupe never tries to sound spectacular. It isn’t voiced to create a false impression of detail or excitement. Instead, it removes itself from the equation to an extraordinary degree, leaving the cartridge, transformer and the recording to define the final presentation.

There are certainly phono stages with stronger personalities. Some sound warmer, others larger than life and others deliberately romantic. The Lupe takes a different approach. It trusts the rest of the analogue chain to provide the character, and concentrates on preserving information with exceptional transparency and vanishingly low noise.
After living with it for a while, I found myself appreciating it for reasons that extended well beyond its impressive specification sheet. It adapted effortlessly to whatever cartridge I decided to use that day, integrated beautifully with both my Kondo CFz and Auditorium 23 T2 step-up transformers, and consistently revealed the strengths of recordings without drawing attention to itself.
It doesn’t try to become the star of the system, it just allows everything else to perform at its very best. For anyone serious about analogue replay, particularly those who enjoy experimenting with different cartridges and step-up transformers, it is one of the most complete and thoughtfully engineered phono stages I have encountered.

You might wonder why I haven’t expended lots of words comparing the Lupe directly with my Kondo GE-1. The answer is pretty simple: that was never the purpose of this. The GE-1 has earned its place in my system, but I would much rather assess a component on its own merits than attempt to elevate one product by finding faults in another. It’s pretty easy to write reviews that focus on what something doesn’t do as well as a favourite reference, but I think that approach often says more about the reviewer than it does about the component.
What I can say is this: the Lupe impressed me enough that I bought it, which is the highest compliment I can pay it. Not because it replaced everything else I own, but because it brought something genuinely worthwhile to my analogue system. Its transparency, flexibility and ease of use the presets are super useful and fully configurable, which make it an exceptional partner for the wide variety of cartridges and step-up transformers I enjoy using, and it has earned its place through its own strengths rather than by comparison with anything else.
I’ve always found it far more rewarding to understand what a piece of equipment does exceptionally well, where its strengths lie, and why someone might enjoy owning it. Audio should be about discovering music and appreciating good engineering, not reducing every listening session to a forensic exercise in finding flaws. That just isn’t fun.

There aren’t really any sacred cows in audio for me anymore. Life is too short to be dogmatic about a particular approach, topology or technology simply because it fits with what we think hi-fi should be. If you’d told me a few years ago that I’d end up buying a phono stage like the Lupe, I’m not sure I’d have believed you. On paper it seems almost comically technological compared with my usual approach. App control, stored cartridge profiles, software configurable loading and gain, and not a tube anywhere in sight. Shock, horror.
But when technology is implemented this well, and more importantly when it actually works fluidly, flawlessly and in ways that are genuinely useful, it becomes rather seductive. Nothing about the Lupe feels like technology for technology’s sake. The cleverness largely disappears into the background and just makes using it easier. I can change cartridges, recall the appropriate settings and get on with listening to records. I’m far more interested these days in whether something works, sounds good and makes me want to use it than whether it conforms to some predetermined idea of how audio equipment ought to be designed.

There have been a few reviews by actual reviewers that are worth reading too:
Hifi Plus
Hifi News
PT Audio
Positive Feedback

Mola Mola blurb:
The standalone version of our well-known archival grade Phono stage features three single-ended inputs and one balanced input. It has a balanced output as well as a single-ended output. The Lupe with its dedicated power supply, k and the added “subsonic filter” provides the discerning record aficionado with the most accurate set-up for recreating the magic of the turntable as it was intended. The display of the well-known “half sized chassis” Lupe offers at a glance information on the settings.
What was conceived as a simple RIAA add-on for the Makua Preamplifier (also available in the Kula Integrated amplifier) has quickly spiraled into the quietest and probably most versatile phono stage ever built. MC/MM input stages are optimized for current noise and voltage noise respectively. Unlike the more common arrangement of an MC head amp feeding into the MM stage, the two stages are fully independent, realizing an equally short signal path for both. Input gain is switchable in 5dB steps over a 40dB range. Input resistance and capacitance are individually switchable. Available EQ settings cover practically all known cutting curves including 78 RPM.
All settings are software controllable, either on the fly using a smart-phone or tablet via the Mola Mola Remote app or directly stored under the preset buttons. Digitally controlled all switching is done in the analogue domain. The Lupe can be configured to route any of the four inputs through the phono stage, this allows you to have multiple turntables and/or cartridges connected.

Key features Mola Mola Lupe:

Performance

Input noise (MC): 0.35nV/rtHz
Input noise (MM): 0.9pA/rtHz
Sensitivity: variable from 30uV to 5mV
THD, IMD: not measurable
RIAA conformance: +/-0.1dB
Subsonic filter -3dB @20Hz

AVAILABLE LOADS

Variable	Depends of “CAR”
	In case of MM	In case of MC
“RES”	120kΩ 75kΩ 47kΩ 30kΩ 18kΩ	1kΩ 650Ω 400Ω 250Ω 150Ω 100Ω 60Ω
“CAP”	0pf 50pf 100pf 150pf 220pf 270pf 330pf 380pf	NA

AVAILABLE GAIN

Variable	Depends of “CAR”
	In case of MM	In case of MC
GAIN	45dB 50dB	52dB 57dB 62dB 67dB 72dB 77dB 82dB 87dB

AVAILABLE TIME CONSTANTS

t1: 200, 250, 318, 400, 450us
t2: 50, 64, 75, 100us
bass shelf: 14, 18, 20dB