> it seems like over kill.
It may be. But most of the "affordable" phono preamps are crap.
"Radio Shack sells an okay one" I disagree. It wasn't really good enough for me 30 years ago, which is why I rolled my own.
With modern asian production, it "should" be trivial to make a very-decent phono preamp for $25 retail.... but the TAA review says that they all (up to ~$99 at least) have major (and stupid) flaws. IIRC (i may not), the Rolls had 2dB erro all through the high-end, a really annoying flaw. Some other didn't roll-off the highs at all. The ART has so much subsonic noise that power amps panic.
Having a GOOD phono preamp is a joy. I never regretted rolling my own, but it was a lot of messing around.
I'm really annoyed that there isn't a sub-$99 phono preamp that I can live with. I did hack the ART, to lose the subsonic 1/f noise and get the EQ closer to right, but that shouldn't have been necessary.
> I'm a little put off by the $40 price tag for a pcb
It's Jim's full-time bill-paying hobby. He's doing good work, both at the walnut-box kilobuck end and with ~$99 gizmos like a USB dongle and an affordable phono preamp that does not suck at ALL. Yeah, you are paying for a house in Hawaii rather than a chinese slum like most other affordable audio products. Your choice to pay his price, or not.
> from what i've read, riaa eq will do the trick
Well, duh. Tape heads need tape-head preamps. Even mikes need mike preamps. Magnetic phono needles need an appropriate phono preamp. Historically, this was built into the control/power amp, not in the transport as tape decks do. And at a later stage of history, control/power-amp builders omitted the $10 phono stage (you could just shop rummage sales, find a nice $20 Sansui from 1976, it may have an adequate phono stage). You "can" play records by cranking the gain and slamming the Bass/Treb to the stops, but it ain't right. The phono preamp makes it right.
Rod Elliot's phono stage will be fine and cheap. It will work very fine with a TL072; the 5532 is not necessarily lower-noise in mag-needle use, and the high-end grit in the TL072 is largely masked by the typical phonodisk's flaws (which through the 1980s, would have included a dozen BiFET chips or worse in the mastering signal path). Fun to try both, but if all you have is Radio Shack's Partz Close-Out rack, you can do a fine phono preamp with TL072 and carbon-film.