"Five Stars" – What Hi-fi? Magazine
Beautiful Performance, High Class Elegant Design
The LX2-LPS is Musical Fidelity's brand new baby. It is a high quality flexible MM/MC phono stage with adjustable impedance and excellent technical performance. Housed in beautifully detailed and handsome metalwork, it is the epitome of understated high class elegance.
Musical Fidelity designed this phono stage for reference level listening, so it is unerringly accurate and faithful to the input. Its purpose in life is to give you your music as its artists and producers intended: nothing more, and nothing less.
England's What Hi-fi? magazine was so taken with the LX2-LPS that it gave the component its top rating of Five Stars. "The LX2-LPS’s creamy full-bodied presentation buoys meandering piano lines and luscious synth pads, with the vocal presented gorgeously with a combination of warmth and dulcet expression that suits Lewis’s croon to a tee," notes the magazine."It delivers a more engaging performance, and one that comfortably validates a five-star review."
Killer Technical Performance
The critical elements of a phono stage are accurate RIAA, low noise, low distortion, and overload margin. Musical Fidelity paid meticulous attention to all of these elements when designing the LX2-LPS.
You get killer technical performance with the LX2-LPS. Musical Fidelity's RIAA correction is famous for its predictable and consistent accuracy. The LX2-LPS accuracy is ±0.25dB 20 Hz - 20 kHz, and it extends to 45 kHz, so there is no overshoot ringing. This results in absolutely clear high frequencies with no intermodulation or other distracting anomalies.
The noise ratio on both MM (better than 82dB) and MC (better than 72dB) is outstanding and virtually inaudible at any volume setting. "That is unless you are a half deaf head-banger," notes Musical Fidelity's founder and CEO Antony Michaelson. "But then I don't expect that MF's refinement and subtly would be quite your thing!"
The LX2-LPS distortion is vanishingly low, typically less than 0.007% across the audio band. Overload margin is exemplary. Simply put, it is virtually impossible for any real world cartridge to overload it. "As we all know nothing is perfect, but the LX2-LPS gets very near," notes Antony Michaelson.