@billstevenson : Along all those I learned the critical importance of passive devices in the overall audio item designs, devices as capacitors, resistors, fuses, power electrical connectors and the like. Examples are like these: all the power electrical system cables are hard wired directly to the boards/electrical path input and all those cables are made by silver material, my electronics has not any fuse at the lectrical power input ( yes, a little risky. ).
Certainly the best passive devices are not to use it but devices as capacitors or resistors almost always are need it. The speakers are directly tri-wired at the amplifiers outputs from each crossover filters. Yes all with silver wire including the ribbon silver inductors.
You can see in my Agon virtual system what I had in those learning times and in those pictures you can appreciate 3 TTs with 10 diferent tonearms ( I owned arond 20* ) and 10 diferent top cartridges ( I owned over 150. ).
Do you know how " discovery " the MM/MI cartridge quality levels? well that was in 2008 when I tested the first Essential 3150 with 4-5 MM/MI that I already owned but not used due that the corrupted AHEE teaches all of us that the name of the gaME IN CARTRIDGE WAS lomc ONES and that is totally false but to achieve the true MM/MI carrtridges quality real levels we need a very first rate MM phono stage and an excellent line stage that is what all Essential models have along a dedicated active higjh gain MC stage ( yes , the unit is SS . ). In all those and today days I never had/have to care about load cartridge impedance changes due that LOMC cartridge are not sensitive to that kind of load and in MM I work with 100koms instead 47kohms. Yes when I use the Denon 1000 SUT it looks 100kohms as load.
Nothing was or is at random and that's why I already understand your post: I lived the full experiences about. From there I learned about the experience to be seated at bnear field position in a live MUSIC events. First than aLL i'M A music LOVER and hardware is only a tool.
Btw, OMA does not have FR specs because almost no one " cares " about not only them that are sellers.
R.