Dispelling a myth about cartridge loading

Don't know where Stereopile's writers have been for the past couple of decades but this is old news.

Serious manufacturers like Lyra, Mod-Wright, Atmasphere et al have long known that loading is for the benefit of the preamp, not the cartridge, having zero effect on a cartridge's measured frequency response.

Indeed no loading was the best with Herron phono stage when I owned it. SOunded much better than any load

Yep.
American phono stages from the 80s/90s were far ahead of anything from Europe and Japan.
A simple 47k input with lots of gain could handle most cartridges.

My old Audio Research SP8 had enough gain for the Ortofon MC3000 with it's tiny 0.1mv output.
It also sounded better than the matching Ortofon transformer.

You guys are doing my head in.

All my givens are no longer true...

Old news.

Back in the 80's Harry Pearson of The Absolute Sound was a fan of the straight in approach while all the Uk based guys were using head amps etc.

I once asked Gary Morrison if the Vinyl would sound better hard wired for loading, his reply was an unequivocal yes but the market demanded loading adjustability.