Product Description
At heart, the Stereophile Class A Recommended and Editors’ Choice/Product of the Year Award-winning Sutherland Engineering Duo MM/MC phono preamplifier is a cross between the company’s 20/20 and flagship PhonoBlock models. In practice, the two-chassis Duo serves as a knockout analog instrument in its price class – a U.S.A.-made component that borrows much of its design from a $10k cost-no-object product and delivers a level of musicality you will cherish for many years to come, if not forever. Detailed, natural, pure, dimensional, accurate, insightful: A few of the many positive sonic traits that will spring to mind once Duo enters your system and begins to help turn the information embedded in vinyl grooves into reach-out-and-touch-it aural experiences. Duo provides any listener fortunate to own it with superlative performance via perfectionist-minded focus and stunningly quiet operation. It all circles back to founder Ron Sutherland’s emphasis on smart engineering and proven physics.
The Sutherland Engineering Duo’s two-box layout automatically eliminates crosstalk, as each chassis gets its own circuit as well as its own built-in AC power supply and IEC power inlet. The shielded power supply module has one output split into two independently filtered and regulated branches – one for each of the gain stages. There’s also more room for the internal parts, which benefits overall reliability. Each channel also features identical electrical and mechanical environments. Duo mitigates circuit-board dielectric properties in the same fashion as PhonoBlock. At twice the industry standard, each 1/8-inch-thick, double-sided FR-4 fiberglass board provides both needed absorption and extreme rigidity for component mounting. Once again, Sutherland refuses to compromise on any attribute. Just lift the cover and see.
The Sutherland Engineering Duo’s custom-wound 1% polystyrene film capacitors, Wima Polypropylene capacitors, Dale/Vishay 1% metal film resistors, gold-plated Teflon-insulated RCA connectors, and gold-plated configuration headers and shunts speak to the hand-picked quality within each box. Sutherland’s trademark, ultra-clean housing – comprised of a 14-gauge cold-rolled steel base, baked epoxy powder-coat finish, and half-inch-thick anodized aluminum panel – complete a phono preamplifier more than prepared to be your daily (and dynamic) Duo.
