Pickering Model 132E Record Compensator
Six clicks of a rotary switch, and every scratchy 78 and worn LP in the collection suddenly makes sense again.
Overview
Early phono preamps had no rack of switches. The job of matching a record's built-in EQ curve fell to a separate outboard box. Pickering's Model 132E Record Compensator is that box. It is a passive, power-free equalization network that sits between a magnetic cartridge and the preamplifier. It corrects for the wildly inconsistent recording curves that record companies used through the early LP era. Without proper compensation, a European pressing could boom and an early American LP could sound thin, and there was no single "correct" setting to fix both.
The 132E has a six-position rotary switch. The earliest documentation lists the positions as European 78 rpm records; Victor 45 rpm and Decca 78 rpm records; a 500-cycle turnover setting; a position covering Capitol, new Victor 33⅓, and the Audio Engineering Society curve; a position for Columbia, London, and most LP records; and finally a "noisy records" setting intended to strip the hiss from old, worn shellac and vinyl. That sixth position is a deliberate high-frequency roll-off that trades sparkle for quiet. Most of the records people owned in the early 1950s were not pristine.
Pickering describes the unit as an inherently low-distortion R-C device. The equalization is done entirely with resistors and capacitors, with no active gain stage and no tubes to drift or go noisy. Pickering advertised its cartridges in this era as offering high output, wide range performance and low distortion, the choice of audio engineers throughout the world (High-Fidelity, July 1953, p.24). Pickering emphasized that precision elements were used in its construction to give accurate compensation. It requires no power and, per the company, can be mounted in any position, so it could be tucked behind a preamp or under a turntable plinth. Connection is simple: the cable from the pickup plugs into the connector on one side of the case, and the cable out to the preamplifier plugs into the other.
The 132E is not a universal accessory. The network was voiced around Pickering's own pickup characteristics, and pairing it with another maker's cartridge means the curves won't land where the dial says they will. The same review also flagged a practical detail: the 132E wants a preamplifier with a 47,000-ohm input resistance. The GE units of the day had a lower input resistance, but any serviceman could swap the 6,800-ohm input resistor for a 47,000-ohm part. Pickering's own preamplifier shipped with the correct resistor already in place.
The 132E was revised at least once. A 1954 Audio new-products notice announced a reengineered version furnishing "full compensation for the most recent recording curves adopted by the record industry," most notably a new position matching the Orthophonic-AES curve that many major labels were adopting and that was being discussed as a uniform standard for the entire industry. The revised switch positions shifted accordingly: European 78; London 33 / Old LP (for most 33⅓ records made before June 1953); Old Capitol / Old AES; a Maximum Highs / Maximum Bass setting; and the familiar Noisy Records position. The two versions do not carry identical positions, so check the dial legend.
Pickering positioned the 132E as a companion to its Model 230H Equalizer-Preamplifier, and the pairing was pitched squarely at radio stations and recording studios as well as serious home listeners — the 230H was described as having intermodulation distortion of 0.2 per cent at normal output level, and Pickering claimed the combination was ideal for applications requiring accurate, low-noise, distortion-free playback. Whether the 132E earns a permanent slot in a modern system depends entirely on how many pre-1955 records are in rotation and whether a Pickering cartridge is on the tonearm. For a collector running a period-correct mono rig, it is one of the few ways to hear those early pressings the way their engineers intended. For everyone else, it is a beautifully made answer to a question that modern phono stages have already solved in software and silicon.
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