Review on Enhance Vinyl Sound Quality with Pro-Ject Phono Box DS2 USB Preamplifier - Black by Art Clark

I had four USB phono stages. Let's forget the excellent features and just talk about the sound. Compared to the NAD PP4, the Parasound ZPhono USB, and the early Pro-Ject Phono Box, this is by far the quietest of the four. Turn the gain all the way up, turn up the volume on the amp and listen with headphones and you won't hear any hiss, just a faint hum coming from the mains. This hum is well below the audible threshold at playback levels and many orders of magnitude below, for example, the noise floor. The audio is so low that I thought maybe some sort of filtering was going on, but the frequency capture of a recording viewed in Audition shows a slightly stronger ultrasonic capture of the high frequencies. No sign of filtering. So he fulfills his task in an exemplary manner. So let's say you can stand some noise - I can. That's not why I threw out the other three models here. NAD was working great until it suddenly broke up and spat out a distorted, muffled sound - look for reviews, this is a common complaint. The Parasound was very loud and prone to various types of interference due to the cables overlapping behind and at its location. The thing seemed solid and had great performance, but something is really wrong under the hood. The basic Pro-Ject Phono Box has no gain control for the USB output and it cuts out for me when mounted on an MC (I have an MC cart). So I had to use it on MM and programmatically amplify a very weak signal. This signal sounds pretty good (yes there is noise, but it's almost inaudible), so while I've sold the Parasound and threw away NAD, I'll leave the Pro-Ject in the closet.