Ortofon Verismo Supporting Equipment

Just a quick video to highlight my choices in equipment to partner with the Verismo.
Most importantly, the Technics SL1000R. The quietest, most speed accurate turntable in the market and probably ever made. Provides the absolutely dark background required for the cartridge to demonstrate its abilities. The arm matches perfectly and provides a tested resonance frequency of 9Hz (Tacet test LP).
A step-up transformer is the little-known secret sauce for any moving coil cartridge since it provides the required voltage gain to be connected to the phono stage of your preamplifier. They are absolutely silent, absolutely linear and offer distortion levels that are almost unmeasurable. They make any MC coil amplifier redundant. There aren't many available on the market. The ST70 is an excellent, state of the art, modern, well-constructed one. An additional, significant expense but well worth it with a pickup of this caliber.
The LH 9000 headshell is matched for the cartridge, solid magnesium with integrated carbon fiber dampener. Given the perfect resonance frequency provided by the cartridge/tonearm combo I would say it works brilliantly.
Ortofon 6NX turntable cables are an extravagance given that any decent pair of shielded RCA cables (SPDIF conformant) will do the job at a fraction of the price, but they are a well-constructed, very visually appealing solution when you have two pairs of cables that are obviously visible lying around the platter (vanity won). I can't stress this enough, shielded, cables are a necessity, not an option for moving coil applications and should be used in all turntable connections, even moving magnet. Non shielded cables will lead to low level, high frequency hiss that can become audible when listening to quiet passages at high volumes. Shielded cables lower that interference by 30dB or more. On my system I can crank up the volume to 100% on any line level output and not hear a thing from the speakers, thanks to a streamer (Cambridge audio 851N) and an amp (MC 462) that have as signal to noise of over 120dB. With the phono I can crank it to 90% plus with essentially the same noise floor, an extraordinary performance for phono and about 95 dB plus. I tried it with non-shielded cables, and it dropped to around 75! Moral of the story......shielded cables are mandatory!
Finally, word to the wise, solid-state electronics such as amps, pre's CD's, streamers, etc. are 100% immune to vibration. Tube components unless they have a loose tube or something are too. Don't drink the snake oil! However, the need for isolation is patently obvious for turntables. First, the turntable must do its part given that isolation is one of its fundamental functions! Unfortunately, a turntable's isolation quality tends to run hand in hand with steep increases in price! The good news is that isolators can be very cheap. The DIY Isolators my two BW DB1 subs and the credenza that holds my platter, as well as all my other components (about 450 lbs net), consist of commercial grade rubber/EVA foam isolators glued to 1/8-inch steel plates. The EVA is blue, so I simply took a fat black Sharpie and inked them black! Total cost of about 7 dollars per isolator and they have a load bearing of 960lbs each! I have tested the whole system to be feedback free to 5 Hz (Tacet test disc again!)
I hope this info is useful to the ever-growing vinyl fan base in general and included my usual live recorded, 24/96 rendition of one of my favorite Fleetwood Mac tracks. From the 45 RPM release of Rumors. Please Comment below!