Preamp Inputs

I’m hoping this isn’t a dumb question, but which input do you guys use to plug in your phono stages (assuming like me you have a din rather than RCA terminated cable). Maybe they’re all the same, but I feel I can hear a slight improvement with my Urika plugged into the CD input of my 552 and a slight decrease in sound quality plugged into A/V. It could obviously be my ears playing tricks on me, but is there any assumed wisdom here? I guess whatever sounds best is best, but curious as to whether there’s any science behind it.
Thanks!

Its possible that the inputs 4, 5 and 6 are marginally compromised by being dual input/output connections rather than the input-only connections of input 1, 2 and 3.

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On the Shoebox Preamps, I believe the Tuner input is cited as being the ‘best’ one - because it has the most ‘direct’ connection. But maybe its because it doesnt carry any outputs…?

You have two RCA inputs on your 552 and you can assign them to any button you like.

Here’s one to do your head in but pretty unrelated.
Running a stageline N for a Decca cartridge I got terrible hum when it was assigned to AUX2 be reassigning it to AUX1 reduced the hum to nearly inaudible without any other changes. I was running two decks, the other with a supercapped superline, no fiddling with earthing or cables had any effect and I was using AUX power so couldn’t change the actual socket for the stageline but swapping the assignment of the two phono stages did the trick.

That’s pretty weird, glad you were able to fix it. I’m hum free thank goodness.
It doesn’t seem like my question has unearthed (no pun intended) any views that any one of the inputs on a 552 offers a sound quality improvement over any of the others, so it was probably just the placebo effect of my having switched them out.

There’s actually 9 inputs in total, Six DIN 180, a DIN270 carrying power and two RCAs. If you have an RCA to DIN180 cable there’s plenty of options. I’ve used a few for the Hiline from the ND555 but haven’t noticed a difference that can’t be explained by a compromised cable run so use the one that gives the best, which is the one on the end intended for CD, though I’ve mapped it to button 3,
The Lavender DIN from my superline goes to input 6 and it’s mapped to 6 (AUX) and I’ve never moved it on another input.
I’ve not used the RCA inputs for anything serious just the Rega DAC I used with my Core whilst awaiting the ND555, though I was expecting an NDS replacement for some of that time. I used Chord 2m Chrysalis cable as they sounded better than the Crimson RCA to DIN and I had them both handy.

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