I bought a Beogram 8000 with a MMC 20CL cartridge at an estate sale. It seems fairly clean and turned on when plugged in. The AC connection is a 5 pin with a connected ground. I am a novice at hooking up vintage audio, so I did some research. I learned I needed a pre-amp to connect the B&O to my newish Onkyo home theater system so after more research bought an Audio-Technica AT-PEQ3. I skimmed the instructions and hooked it up and started enjoying some old vinyl. Two songs into the B side it froze. The arm lifted, the digital speed readout went black and nothing works to get the arm back to the starting point. I figured I had hooked something up wrong so read the directions in depth. The obvious shocker was in the A-T Preamp instructions. Two things stand out: 1.) Designed for turntables using a moving-magnet (MM) type cartridge; not for use with moving-coil (MC) type cartridges. (What is the MMC?) 2.) Using the supplied RCA cable, connect the output jacks of the AT-PEQ3 to the line-level input jacks of your device. NOTE: DO NOT CONNECT THIS DEVICE TO A PHONO INPUT (Following the diagram for the Onkyo system, I plugged them into the CD IN jacks, which can be used for a CD or Turntable. Also, the Onkyo instructions say a turntable with an MC cartridge needs to be connected through an MC Head Amp in addition to the Phone Preamp) Have I blown out my new aquisition or is there a fix? Do I need the MC head amp? Thanks for any help you can give.

If your Onkyo has a phono input, it has a preamp installed, and you can hokk up your deck directly, the 8000 has no pramp, the MMC cartridge is to consider as moving magnet and not as moving coil.

I have my BG 5000 connected to my Onkyo to the phono input and it works OK

Hi there,

Well your problem has absolutely nothing to do with the cartridge and preamp matching!

The fact that you actually had some success at first shows that this part works fine and yes the MMC 20CL is an (excellent) high level cartridge!

Do you see the red stand-by dot?

Now there might be some problem with your DIN to RCA adapter shorting the Datalink pins of the plug (the two extra pins inside the plug).

If you don't see the stand-by led there might be a bad connection inside the transformer of the Beogram. This is fairly easy to check because it will just slide out (no screws). Open it and check the white connector.

Otherwise, you will have to go deeper into the deck to look for bad solder joints at the transformer connector which is very common in these decks!