For Markus Wierl, who calls his company – or himself? – Audio-Freak and has been dealing with audiophile music reproduction for many years, providing his customers with wide-ranging advice before making a sale is of primary importance, as can be seen from his website and his YouTube channel. Furthermore, he is much more open-minded than the author when it comes to the field of high-end.

He is not much into being deterred by home cinema systems with up to seven channels and four subwoofers, and as an avowed analogue enthusiast, he nevertheless relies on digital room correction in the – as I have to admit – excellent sounding listening room in his living room studio. He is also firmly convinced that a high-quality transformer with an equally high-quality phono stage for moving-coil cartridges is at least on a par with an MC phono equalizer, if not superior. That is why he decided to start the distribution in Germany and Switzerland of the two transformers, the MM phono stage, a Denon DL-103 variant in which the generator is integrated into an aluminum/wooden housing that also takes on the function of the headshell with its SME connection, as well as various affordable phono cables from the Slovenian manufacturer MK Analogue. A speciality of the transformers is that they feature a balanced circuitry, equipped with XLR inputs and outputs. Surprisingly, Markus Wierl and I agree on the subject of symmetry – and not only when it comes to the processing of delicate phono signals. Unfortunately, the MK Analogue device outputs the signal in an unbalanced fashion after the transformer: there is – still? – no balanced MM phono stage available. However, the signal is significantly stronger after the transformer and therefore less susceptible to interference on its further path. After I was completely thrilled by the tube phono stage from E.A.T., in which Moving Coil signals are pre-amplified by a transformer, I was quite enthusiastic about trying out the MK Analogue combo – whereby, as a playing partner, I naturally had one or two SPUs from Ortofon in mind.

When planning the review, Markus Wierl immediately asked me about the cartridges that I used to work with the most. He promptly made suggestions as to which of the two MK Analogue transformers, which settings and which terminating plugs I could use to get the best sound out of Lyra's Etna and Olympus SL, as well as the Transrotor Tamino, which is being manufactured by MySonicLab. And at first, that was not what I had in mind: Even though I liked the E.A.T. transformer solution, I still believe that phono stages with an MC input are the amplifiers of choice for high-quality moving coil pickups – apart from all the SPU variants. But more on that later.

The first two letters of MK Analogue are the initials of the company's founder, Matej Kelc, who, by his own account, built his first transformer in 1982 as a teenager. During the first years of his professional career, he worked in the hi-fi and pro-audio industry. He started out as a salesman but quickly became a developer. In 2000, he returned to Slovenia, where he had spent the first five years of his life, and five years later he founded a metal processing company, which soon expanded into plastic injection moulding and wood processing. However, his passion remained music and audio technology, which is why he launched MK Analogue, drawing on his network of suppliers in Slovenia, Austria and Germany. The new company's first two products were, as you would expect, two transformers: the SUT-1L for cartridges with low impedance and the SUT-1M for those with medium internal impedance. The former is intended for systems with up to 10 ohms of impedance, while the latter is recommended for cartridges from Denon, EMT, Audio Technica and Benz Micro, among others..