The OP is asking for loading and not why many phono stages works in different way when we make load values.@krelldog You can safely ignore Raul's remarks in this matter. Most of the remarks above are false.
Who cares, he as any one of us already owns a phono stage it does not matter what and no one can make a world research to find out which phono stages works as should be, it's imposible to do that.
So, what each one of us have to do is to load our cartridges according what we have and according each one music/sound priorities. That's all.
My prior comments were about the theory behind how all this works.
Regarding your situation, it is advisable to run the least amount of loading possible (by least, meaning the highest resistance with the least capacitance). To this end, you might see if you can find out what the capacitance is of your tone arm cable. If you can find a cable with less capacitance, it might sound better even though it might also be less expensive. A shorted cable will of course have less capacitance- for example cutting your cable to half of its length will double the resonant frequency (assuming no input capacitance in the phono section; some solid state phono sections have quite a lot of input capacitance due to the capacitance at the gate or base of the first semiconductor used). The more capacitance the cable has, the lower the resonant frequency and its best to keep the latter as high as possible.
If it just does not sound right with 47K as a load, I would use the highest loading resistance available to you that takes the edge off. I've not played with every Krell phono section but those I have have been unhappy without loading, suggesting an unstable phono section. The actual goal is not only tonal neutrality, but **also** the least ticks and pops. When you load at a very low value (like less than 100 ohms) its possible to reduce the cartridge output and also decrease high frequency tracking abilities. So this should be avoided if at all possible.
There is no 'set' value of loading that can be specified by any cartridge manufacturer (and suggestions from other audiophiles won't be ideal either). This is because they cannot predict the tone arm cable capacitance nor the input capacitance of the phono stage (ours tends to be quite low as this has been on our radar for decades). So the values you see cartridge manufacturers suggest are always generalities, as they can't assume that a given phono section is stable. But at the same time, this is also why 47K is suggested and is the industry standard- because its really all that is needed if the phono section is properly designed.
