Thanks Sean, but no need, I’ll just have a go at fixing mine. For the cost of four transistors and maybe four caps it is well worth a go.
There is absolutely no need to pay someone £50 to set up these boards, it is simple assuming you can solder/desolder, and its a really nice quality glass-fibre board so can take a good few goes without tracks lifting or anything. If anyone wants to have a go looking at my picture upthread the row of four comonents directly beneath/behind the RCA sockets are the ones you should focus on. The outside pair (left and right) are the loading capacitors despite looking like resistors, and by default they are 220pf. Most cartridges will like a lot less, my board is set to 39pf. The inner pair of components are the loading resistors and by default they are 47k. This value will be right for the majority of carts, but its nice to know where they are. That’s it, that is all you need to know!
I really liked what the Nagaoka was doing with my JC Verdier Control B last night so I’m going to leave that in the system for a while as the cart beds in. By the fact it worked I am all but certain that the Nagaoka likes quite a lot of capacitance.
The Verdier has no ‘spec’ as such, and whilst it comes with a full circuit diagram I don’t have the electronics skill to read it, but my guess from having owned it for a good few years and having tried a fair few carts is it is setup for classic Shures etc. It sounds great with my old 70s M95ED, and that likes around 400pf total. The Verdier sounds terrible with the Ortofon 2M Black, just unusably bad, and that likes to see around 150pf IME (spec is 150-300pf, but it prefers the lower end), it is a little better with the 540/II, but I’d still not want to listen to it and the Quad set to 39pf just kills it with the 540/II. With the Nagaoka the Verdier sounds a good bit better than the 39pf loaded Quad. As such I’m confident that the Nagaoka will actually sound very good with the stock Quad 220pf board. It will certainly not sound bad even if there is a little further tweaking possible. FWIW I think the Verdier is about 220 to 300pf.
One other thing is that the Quad 34 has an aggressive/bloody horrible ‘rumble’ filter. I got Rob to dramatically reduce its impact when he fully recapped my 34. I think it is just a matter of altering a couple of capacitor values, but it transforms the phono stage of this preamp from ‘meh’ to something that is actually seriously good. By default it just sounds gutless and sat-on, ditch the rumble filter and it has some proper heft and kick to it.