Elliott, With all due respect, I sometimes don’t know what you are trying to say. I think you make the SUT business much more complex than it needs to be, but that’s just me. My understanding is or was that the OP found he did not like the SQ he got from his cartridge when using a 1:10 SUT, although the gain factor was apparently OK. Whereas, he felt he had too much gain when he hooked up the same cartridge to the MC inputs of his phono stage, which provides a gain of 60db into 100 ohms, BUT he did prefer the SQ in the latter hook-up. I certainly could be wrong, but the question seems to be how to achieve a 100-ohm load with a SUT, in the belief that the "problem" is the impedance seen by the cartridge, 470 ohms with a 1:10 SUT vs 100 ohms with the MC gain stage providing 60db. Yes, he did ask "what ratio SUT should I use". Without changing some other parameters, there is no simple answer to that question that will give the proper amount of gain into 100 ohms. Going down in step-up ratio, e.g., to 1:5, will result in a higher net impedance (>470 ohms, or less of a load on the cartridge). Going up in step-up ratio would put him back in the situation of having too much gain, although we don’t know for sure what is the gain of the MM section which factors into the net gain after adding any SUT.
OK, I broke down and did some research on the Cary PH301. Apparently the MM stage presents a 68K ohm resistance, with 42db gain. First of all, this means the cartridge "sees" 680 ohms (68,000/100) across a 1:10 SUT, not 470 ohms. (We are dividing the resistance at the input to the phono stage by the square of the turns ratio of the SUT to calculate the net load seen by the cartridge.) The MC stage of the PH301 gives 62db gain according to the owners manual on-line, not 60db. Interestingly, after the SUT provides a voltage gain of 10X, which is 20db, the net gain with a 1:10 SUT into the MM section is 62db (42db + 20db), exactly the same as the gain achieved with direct connection into the MC section. So I have to back track on something I wrote above and also ask the OP, is the gain really detectably different via your SUT into MM vs direct into MC? Also, maybe the SQ difference is indeed related only to the difference in impedances seen by the cartridge. Anyway, if the OP prefers the SUT connection for its SQ, he could change the value of the MM load resistance, either by paralleling a second resistor of the value needed to reduce the net resistance to 10K ohms, or by simply removing the 68K resistor and replacing it with 10K. (10K on the phono side will give the cartridge 100 ohms across the SUT, 10,000/100.) After that, the MM and MC inputs will be exactly the same as regards both gain and cartridge loading. Case closed.