Aurorasound Announces AFE-10 Expander for Vintage Cartridges

The AFE-10 passive MM-expander of the Japanese company Aurorasound is designed to match the parameters of turntable cartridges with phono stage.

The fact is that phono preamplifiers designed for modern MM cartridges have an impedance of 47 kOhm and a fixed load capacity. Many vintage cartridges do not meet these parameters. The result is an increased level of distortion.

The AFE-10 is said to put the right load on the phono stage. In addition, the Mono button allows you to get an accurate signal from monaural discs, taking into account the signal only from the lateral oscillation of the stylus, while excluding the vertical component. Thus, according to Aurorasound, monaural discs sound cleaner with the AFE-10 MM.

The new product also provides a GND switch, which compensates for the occurrence of a ground loop for individual mono cartridges and allows you to remove pickup noise. Another button “Mute”, in addition to its direct purpose, also includes the mode of demagnetizing the MC cartridge or its step-up transformer. The AFE-10 passive MM expander is suitable not only for MM, VM, MI and IM cartridges, but also for high output MC cartridges.

The cost of the Aurora AFE-10 expander is already known: in the US it will be $400.