Phono cable advice.

best-groove, Please compare my comment that you quoted to your comment.  I hope you'll see we are in complete agreement with respect to the desired endpoint, which is to know approximately how much capacitance your phono cable adds.  Without knowing that, you cannot dial in the remainder of the recommended total, using your phono stage(s).  Going crazy is not necessary, I agree.

I think Atmasphere would agree that in certain environments, like in the middle of any big city, near power lines or large electric devices, it would make sense to use shielded phono cables.  Also, if you don't or can't carefully route your phono cables so as to avoid RF and EMI radiating from your own equipment (or your own refrigerator, for example), it would make sense to have shielding.  But, like certain calculations in higher mathematics, once you know the rules, it's OK to break them.  I make my own cables.  I usually twist the strands of wire (hot with ground or the + and - phases of a balanced signal) to cancel noise, rather than to add a discrete shield.  (Twisting also adds capacitance; there's no free lunch.) I've never felt the need for a circumferential shield on such a cable. On the other hand, I would agree that most commercial phono cables have an integral shield; you're stuck with it. (I live in a suburb of Washington, DC, where there is not much industry and no power lines nearby, etc.)

best-groove, IMO, it's more important to be aware of the capacitance of your particular phono cable, rather than to take such pains to minimize capacitance that you compromise other aspects.  By knowing the capacitance per foot, you can incorporate the total number of pF's into your calculation of the capacitance load on the cartridge.  This is most important for MM types.  Any decent phono cable should not add much more than about 150 pF to the load, usually less, sometimes much less. Some MMs require much more than 150 pF for optimal loading, the rest  are OK with up to 100 pF. So, for many MMs you end up adding C on top of the inherent cable capacitance, rather than subtracting it. Capacitance is much less important for MC types.

I strongly second Dave Pogue's recommendation regarding a "cable cooker".  Anti-cables told me that my new phono cable would require 500 hours of burn-in, assuming only normal use carrying the signal from a cartridge.  I put it on my cooker for 5 full days, and yowzer!

Whatever you buy, this is what you want in a phono cable (or in any RCA to RCA cable for that matter, if possible):  Since the cartridge is an inherently balanced device that is treated as single-ended when using RCA to RCA connection into a single-ended phono stage, you want a cable that uses separate but completely equal conductors, one that connected from "hot" to "hot" and one connected from "ground" (on the phono cartridge pins) to "ground" (the outer barrel of the RCA connection).  The shield, if any, is only connected at one end, to chassis ground.
You may say this is obvious, but many RCA cables carry the ground side of the audio signal on the shield; in this case there is only one wire surrounded by a shield.

Dollar for dollar, I have found nothing better than Anti-cables, at several different price points.  Anti-cables only recently started making phono cables, by which I refer to cables terminated at one end with a Cardas DIN plug and at the other end with KLE male RCAs or Xhadow male XLRs.  This is coming from someone who generally makes his own cables (me).  But I cannot do it as well or for much less cost than can Anti-cables.  ~$500 gets you very close to the very top of their line, for a one meter DIN to RCA cable.  That's what I just bought, and I am blown away.