Hello!
Sorry for the delayed reply. I have mostly been drinking heavily and watching the Christmas Goat webcam. Pretty busy time right now.
You seem to have a good handle on the resistive loading. I have not played with Capacitive loading yet and from everything I see there is no reason to with MC cartridges. There is some cap load from the interconnect and from the phono stage input capacitance already and no reason to add more.... Jim Hagerman has a great loading article that gets a bit more techie and goes into cap loading (and why it is not a good thing for MC carts!) here:
http://www.hagtech.com/loading.html
...
John, Thanks for your reply.
I have read Jim's article and he has also been kind enough to answer a couple of my email Qs .... but .... I still cannot make sense of what is supposed to be best for a MC cartridge (wrt whether a capacitative load is advisable or not!!). I see these descriptions of phono stages like the Manley "Steelhead" which go into great detail about how you can basically infinitely vary the C and R loading for your cartridge .... yet the blurb is not specific wrt the cartridges which can be used with it, in terms of them being MM or MC!!
I would be very grateful if you would treat me as if I were an ignorant dumbo and explain it from first principles. IE.:
* assume one has a MC cartridge.
* assume one's phono IC has some capacitance.
* first example:
a) assume one has one of your step-up transformers feeding a MM phono stage which has NO additional cap loading;
b) assume one has one of your step-up transformers feeding a MM phono stage which has some additional cap loading.
A) What difference in sound will be heard from the above two??
B) How will the cap loading on the MM phono stage affect the MC cartridge??
* second example:
a) assume one has an active head-amp which feeds a MM phono stage which has NO additional cap loading;
b) assume one has an active head-amp which feeds a MM phono stage which has some additional cap loading.
A) What difference in sound will be heard from the above two??
B) How will the cap loading on the MM phono stage affect the MC cartridge??
BTW, what is this "Christmas Goat webcam" you people in the US seem to watch at this time of the year?? Another poster mentioned he was watching it too (we don't get it in Oz!!).
Regards,
Andy