Company & Product Overview
Over the last few years, Cambridge has produced a constant stream of top-rated products, from amplifiers to Blu-ray players. The Cambridge team has an incredible talent for producing great-sounding audio products at affordable prices. Their gear is always extremely musical and easy to listen to for hours.
One of the secrets of Cambridge is their focus on power. Since their origins in developing the toroidal power transformer, they have always focused on making sure the power being supplied to their units is as good as it can be for the price.
Today we’ll be discussing two new phono preamps from Cambridge — necessary components for any high-quality turntable system. While many entry-level tables have phono preamps built in, any true audio enthusiast can speak to the benefits of an outboard phono stage. The new Cambridge Solo and Duo, at $179 and $299 respectively, are both built for performance and value.
Let’s dive in, see how they stack up and help you determine if either one might be a good fit for your vinyl playback system.
Design & Build Quality
At 7” wide and 9” wide respectively, the Solo and the Duo are both smaller than a typical component. They come in simple metal cases, like most Cambridge products.
The front panel of the Solo is minimalistic, with only a power button and the Cambridge logo. The Duo, on the other hand, includes the same power button and logo stamp but also includes a button to select between a moving coil and moving magnet cartridge (more on this in the next section), a large volume knob, and a headphone jack.
One unique design choice that we love about Cambridge products is the way they do their back panels. They print all of their input labels both upside down and right-side up, so that they are easy to read, even while leaning over the units from the front.
Build quality is way above what you would expect for the price — especially in the Solo. When you pop the cover (like we always do), you’ll see a surprisingly stuffed circuit board with a great internal layout to keep the power supply separate from the very low-noise phono stage parts.
Even to our critical eyes, the quality of the parts quality used and the board layout is top notch and way beyond what one would expect for this price. The Duo is very similar but adds some features not found in the Solo.
