The loading is strictly for the preamp’s benefit and does nothing for the cartridge.
The reason it is there is because the inductance of the cartridge and the capacitance of the tone arm cable form a resonant circuit known as a tank circuit, which can be driven into excitation by the energy of the cartridge, creating ultra sonic or (more commonly with LOMC cartridges) RF noise.
If the preamp is unhappy with RFI injected into its inputs it might sound bright. The resistor detunes the tank circuit thus eliminating the RFI and calming things down. The downside as others have pointed out is that the loading forces the cantilever to do more work and makes it stiffer, less able to track higher frequencies.
If the preamp does not care about RFI then there is no need for the cartridge loading. But if its provided with a switch, its a pretty good bet that RFI is an issue. IME use the highest setting that sounds right.
You can find more at this link:http://www.hagtech.com/loading.html
IOW- I’m not making this up (I build phono sections for a living).
Now a side benefit of not having to load the cartridge is often that you also get less ticks and pops, since many of those are created by the phono section itself. Referring to the link above, we see that the peak I mentioned is a good 30 dB (1000x) higher than the signal itself! Yikes! If your phono section has poor overload margin, you tend to get ticks and pops on this account.
The reason it is there is because the inductance of the cartridge and the capacitance of the tone arm cable form a resonant circuit known as a tank circuit, which can be driven into excitation by the energy of the cartridge, creating ultra sonic or (more commonly with LOMC cartridges) RF noise.
If the preamp is unhappy with RFI injected into its inputs it might sound bright. The resistor detunes the tank circuit thus eliminating the RFI and calming things down. The downside as others have pointed out is that the loading forces the cantilever to do more work and makes it stiffer, less able to track higher frequencies.
If the preamp does not care about RFI then there is no need for the cartridge loading. But if its provided with a switch, its a pretty good bet that RFI is an issue. IME use the highest setting that sounds right.
You can find more at this link:http://www.hagtech.com/loading.html
IOW- I’m not making this up (I build phono sections for a living).
Now a side benefit of not having to load the cartridge is often that you also get less ticks and pops, since many of those are created by the phono section itself. Referring to the link above, we see that the peak I mentioned is a good 30 dB (1000x) higher than the signal itself! Yikes! If your phono section has poor overload margin, you tend to get ticks and pops on this account.