I finally hooked up my new Swagman Labs LPS to my Schiit Mani phono section in my modest but somewhat modern living room system. NAD 326BEE integrated (no phono section), old NAD 4020 tuner and NAD C16BEE CD player playing through ELAC Uni-Fi B5 speakers on sturdy stands. Cables are BJC throughout. I use a Revox B795 in this system as it is there largely for winter entertaining and its convenience is wonderful.
While I had to repair the Revox it has always sounded much better than I thought it should. Before trying the new Mani/Swagman combo, I decided to finally replace the stylus on the Grado Signature 8MR mounted on the Revox. It has needed it for a long time.
I bought a new replacement Grado 8MZ stylus several years ago but I couldn't get the old worn out stylus out of the body of the installed 8MR. Since the Revox arm is pretty delicate, I didn't want to yank on it too hard to get it unseated from the cartridge body. Grado styli are installed in the cartridge body at a funny diagonal angle with the black goo Grado uses to seat the stylus so I couldn't wrestle the old worn-out stylus out of the installed body. I know most would cringe at replacing the stylus on a mounted Revox arm, but I figured it would be far easier than uninstalling it and trying to reinstall it. However, yesterday after I finally found the Grado supplied stylus removal tool, I went at it again and was successful (and delicate).
How do these two improvements sound? All I can say is that the Mani/Swagman combo is a very nice combo but so is the new stylus. So very little noise from the phono section and record noise is much reduced too.
More later.