Phono stage hiss - Measurements

[Confused]

I would like to put my two cents in.
With all my due respect, I really don’t understand the “added value” of this discussion.
If somebody says that: “Devialet is doing very well with streaming sources but its phono stage doesn’t sound the same as my tube-based preamplifier”, it sounds more reasonable and interesting to me.

If it sounds like: “Devialet lets me down, because what I am looking for is the best analogue phono stage available on earth under the same chassis with the best high tech digital single platform”, the discussion will be misleading and much less interesting to me.

Imagine the following situation: One has got in his garage the best EV car available on the market that many other people want to have. That car performs very well almost on every aspects. When he bought it, his main focus was on the environment. Someday he heard somebody saying: “The EV car’s weakness is that it cannot make a roaring sound like a premium sport car”. He thinks: “It makes sense”. After this day, his main focus is placed on how to make his EV car roar like a sport car. And he forgets that he has one of the best EV car on earth.

As the OP for this thread I am happy to respond. 

The purpose of this thread was to try to obtain objective data and establish if this aligns with the somewhat conflicting reports of the intrusiveness, or not, of the hiss from the phono stage.

As it states in the OP " One problem is that the subjective reports seem to be very inconsistent, one person's "I don't notice it when listening" is another person's "this is unacceptable in a product like this and is ruining my enjoyment of vinyl".

So is this a simple difference in subjective observation? Or is this a case of there being some variability in the objective performance of the hardware?

The thread was also a response to a request from Devialet's Mathieu Pernot who suggested that anyone who is suffering from the issue could take a digital recording of the phono stage and send it to him for analysis.

My conclusion from the data that I obtained was that the levels of hiss are indeed not an issue. OK, you can hear it if you crank the volume up when not playing anything, but as the hiss sits at -80dB or so with an MC cartridge, during real world listening this really is not an issue.

Moving to subjective observations, I think the Devialet phono provides excellent performance, very clean and accurate. I have tried the same versus external phono stages. My conclusion was that an external phono stage might sound different, but is not definitively better. Personally, I think the Devialet does give the best of both worlds, by performing well with both digital and analogue. 

I had also pretty much forgotten about this thread. So thanks for giving it a bump, nobody else has posted here for about four and a half years.