What Step-up transformers are best value?

Ultimately it will depend on how it interacts with your cartridge and phono pre. In my case the silks outperformed the S&B's. Unfortunately specs and reviews rarely tell the whole story of how an sut will perform in a given system. It would be nice if you could get an evaluation period when buying some of the higher priced step ups. Bottle Head amps are supposedly going to offer an SUT from magnaquest that should be very good and priced reasonable.

I highly recommend the SoundTradition Live! MC-10. Costs about US$990. Here is the website: http://www.obsinc-products.com/servlet/Categories?category=MC+Step-Up+
Units.
Its th best I have heard and is quite a bit better than the Cinemag CMQEE-3440A, the Silk Step-Ups Fidelity Research XG5 and SPU-T100 using either my Ortofon SPU Meister Silver Mk2 or Dynavector XX-2MkII cartridges.

Thanks for all your contributions - all very interesting and informative. I wonder if adding resistors to change the loading would help with the Silks. What values should I try? Where would I fit them? Across the primary connections?

Lutenist- I do not begin to understand the ins and outs, but if you do some searches on the forums you will find that there are different schools of thought on loading primary vs. secondary. I will tell you that w a very high res system, you can hear v small differences in cart loading. I would NOT discount trying a good headamp.

Lutenist,

I have tried resistor loading on the secondary side of the Silk transformers. The best write up on this is in the Bent Audio Forum. Have not tried loading on the primary. I find that loading on the secondary can help. But my preference is the Cinemag over the Silk even with loading. Of course YMMV.