That’s what I would have thought as well, but Gary wrote:
(That’s with the internal stage wrongly set to passive)
If this is correct, then it seems that it WAS set to Hifi all along, so it should have worked with the internal phono stage set to active.
Maybe the app was confused or something, and displayed Hifi although it really was set to Phone.
In this case, changing it to something else and then setting it back to Hifi might clear it.
It definitely should be set to Hifi of course, and if this still leads to distortion with the active internal phono stage, something is seriously wrong.
Agree with the Richer Sounds issue, this is massive failure
That’s partly why I went looking for the phono stage gain…as I mention in my post above, it might be a little hot and lead to distortion (especially if tracking force is too high due to needing adjustment after unboxing).
This doesn’t surprise me I asked their recommendation for speaker cable for my atom when purchasing and they didn’t mention recommended length and spec while my atom has been forgiving of my cables I’d have preferred not to risk overheating at all.