Vintage Preamp/Phono used as phono only

Hi all. First post, so please be gentle. I have a Wright Sound WPL-20 that has recently been put into semi retirement as a preamp and I'd like to still use it as an occasional tubed phono stage. I don't have an issue with the one in my Rogue RP-5 but the one in the Wright is really nice sounding. I'd try to get one of the Wright phonos but they are SUPER difficult to find. The Wright has been finicky lately (and serviced) so I'd like to avoid using the preamp stage too often.

In using this into the Rogue, what would be a better bet....preamp out with a lowish volume adjustment or use the Wright's fixed record out (it's unbuffered I believe) to avoid distortion from the preamp stage? Or could there be a way to isolate the phono stage and bypass the preamp all together?

Thanks!

 

Tape output would be the way to go in my opinion, its how I use an old Cyrus One amplifier (for the phono stage too) in a second system and it works fine.

 

I haven't looked at the schematic but it's likely the tape out is already this, taken right off the selector switch.

 

That's what I was thinking, but schematics for these things died with George Wright. I oddly enough have the manual and it states "whatever signal you hear on your loud speakers will be the signal sent to the tape recorder." I'm wondering if that means it goes through the "amplification stage" of the preamp to get to line level?

 

Just run the turntable to the phono inputs on the pre amp, then tape out to an aux input on the new preamp. That's also what I do, works great

 

You might not need a schematic to figure this out if you look carefully. Look around the selector switch where you choose between phono/tuner/whatever. See if you can see a path from there to the tape outputs. When the phono signal hits that switch, it will already have passed through the phono preamp and will be at a comparable level to a normal high level input. Usually in the olden times the tape out would just come right off that selector switch and out to the jacks, with no buffering or anything, meant to drive a reasonable load like a tape input.

 

Hey guys sorry I was out of town.....I ended up running it with the tape out and it worked fine.....but the internal phono stage on the RP-5 actually (grudgingly) sounds better than doing that so it's going to be retired or passed on. Thanks for the input.