If you are looking for a conventional product review you are in the wrong place. I know of at least 2 more typical and arguably more helpful reviews of the Moon 110 lp out there that will describe the ways in which the Moon 110 lp performs at least as well if not better than other phono preamps at or near it’s approximately $500 price point. If that is the type of review you’re seeking, read no further and search on.
If you’re interested in reading a different sort or review, one that will not try to answer the question of how well the 110 lp performs relative to other phono preamps at it’s price point, but rather how well it performs period, stick around. This review will try to answer THIS question – Is the Moon 110 lp capable of showing us the magic of analog?
Recently a friend of mine bought a new preamplifier with a good phono stage. He’d been running the Moon 110 lp phono preamp through the preamp on the Marantz integrated he’d bought years before for his home theater, and he wanted to convert his system to a 2 channel. He seemed pretty happy with his new preamp, and since he didn’t need the 110 lp for the time being I asked to borrow it.
There’s something of a rule in audio that you get what you pay for. Lately I’ve been finding some exceptions to this rule, and I’ve begun to wonder if maybe there’s someone out there who’s managed to build a phono preamp that performs much better than it’s price would indicate. When another friend who also uses the Moon 110 lp told me how much he liked it, I wondered if, perhaps, the Moon 110 lp was just such a phono preamp.
I liked the Moon 110 lp right away and discovered it does have a lot to recommend it. Above all, it has remarkably good tonal accuracy. It’s also got fairly good top and bottom end extension, is fairly transparent and produces a pretty decent sized sound stage. The 110 lp is, all in all, very pleasant to listen to, with nothing in its sound that calls too much attention to itself.
On the down side, the midrange is a bit thin. Playing a record I used for another phono preamp review I wrote recently, I put on Eagles. The guitars on this album have a generous lushness when played through my CJ phono. With the 110 lp they sounded edgy and lean, as did the vocals, which, lacking their necessary fullness and warmth, sounded strained. The 110 lp delivers decent bass, but the lower midrange is not well fleshed out and the music, overall, wants for weight and palatability.
On my hot stamper of Svjatoslav Richter performing Liszt’s Piano Concerto no. 1 with the London Symphony Orchestra, a record I’ve played a lot and know pretty well, it was also easy to hear the 110 lp’s main weakness. Typically the piano on this recording sounds MASSIVE, but the 110 lp could not convey that size, nor give it the presence and sense of place it has with my CJ phono.
The 110 lp has dip switches to give the user a rather broad range of options for impedance, capacitance and gain settings, and it can be set to work with a wide variety of both MM and MC cartridges. I use a modified Sumiko MC cartridge on my Merrill Williams 101.2 and Triplanar MK VII tonearm. I fiddled a bit with the settings and got it to sound as good as I could, but it’s possible that it would perform better with a different cartridge at different settings.
The Moon 110 lp will definitely show you a lot of what’s on your best records, and likely a lot more than other phono preamps at its price point. Where it falls short is in its ability to flesh out instruments and vocals and to fully liberate each element of the music from the others. Separation of instruments, the depth of the soundstage and the sense of weight and presence we get with better made, more expensive phono preamps isn’t there with the 110 lp.
Actually, I should rephrase that – what isn’t there with the 110 lp we get with MUCH more expensive phono preamps. I’ve spent some time with 4 different phono preamps priced at or near $5k, and I would say the 110 lp is not a GIANT step down from at least 2 of any of those and frankly, better than one of them. So for around $500 the Moon 110 lp strikes me as a heck of a phono preamp for the money.
But the 110 lp won’t let you “see into” the performance the way the better phono preamps can, and therefore it’s not a preamp that will reveal to you what’s possible in analog. You may find yourself liking the heck out of it if you buy one, and if $500 is at the top of your budget I doubt you’ll find better.
But if you do buy one, don’t get too comfortable. There’s MUCH more to analog than this nice little unit can show you. Enjoy it while you have it but set your sights higher when your finances permit.