John Darko
Three years ago – to celebrate its 30th anniversary – Pro-Ject introduced the Debut Pro: a turntable that featured electronic speed adjustment of a TPE-damped aluminium platter and a new single-piece 8.6โณ tonearm made from carbon (for rigidity) and its inner tube from aluminium (for better resonance damping). To that tonearm (outside of the USA) was factory-fitted a Pick-It Pro MM cartridge.
Here’s the teaser trailer:
And here’s Pro-Ject founder and CEO Heinz Lichtenegger discussing the Debut Pro’s more technical aspects:
And here’s our video review. We really dug the sound of this turntable and cartridge combination when we got them in for a listen:
This week comes news of the Debut Pro B where ‘B’ stands for ‘balanced’.
Over the last few years, Licthenegger has added balanced connectivity to numerous Pro-Ject products and the Debut Pro is the latest to get the nod. Why? My best guess is that a) balanced connections offer greater immunity to noise and b) balanced is the OG audiophile catnip to lend any turntable packing it a competitive edge in a world where every man/ufacturer and his dog makes an ‘affordable’ turntable.
The gotcha arrives with the turntable’s cartridge type. Moving coil cartridges are balanced by design but moving magnets are not.
From Pro-Ject’s .pdf explainer: “Cartridges are balanced signal transducers by nature! Due to the internal wiring of MM cartridges, you’ll need an MC cartridge to access the entirety of that balanced signal. If MM cartridges are used with our True Balanced Connection, youโd end up with increased noise on the right channel. This is because the internal generator of an MM cartridge needs to be shielded due to its high internal impedance. For this reason, the generator shield is connected with the right channel ground (= inverted signal). This needs to be done in order to minimize noise in singled-ended RCA connections. On the other hand, because of their low internal impedance, MC cartridges do not need this, meaning the left and right channels and their inverted counterparts carry audio signal only.”
So — why put a mini-XLR output on the back of the Debut Pro B when the cartridge fitted to its tonearm is MM? Because, according to Pro-Ject, the Pick-It Pro has been swapped out for the all-new Pick-It Pro Balanced, which has been tweaked to deliver a true-balanced output.
Pro-Ject’s original Debut Pro sells for โฌ750 but the Debut Pro B will go for โฌ899. Mini-XLR to twin XLR cables are available separately.
Further information: Pro-Ject
