big-greg, Just so some other neophyte doesn’t go off on the wrong track, are you adding 185 ohms of resistance to spritofaudio’s statement that he sees 515 ohms at the inputs of his 834P, in order to get to 700 ohms? If so, that’s WAY wrong. No phono cable (typically less than 2 meters in length) is going to exhibit more than a few ohms resistance, usually less. Perhaps you are confusing resistance with capacitance. Cable capacitance does have to be added in with input capacitance in order to calculate the load capacitance, and a pair of ICs could add as much as 50 to 150pF, but for an MC cartridge like the Hana SL, that is not such a big deal. But resistance of a phono cable is usually irrelevant because it’s quite low.
Spiritofaudio, Doesn’t the 834P use a built-in SUT in order to achieve gain sufficient for an LOMC cartridge? If so, you cannot determine load impedance without knowing the turns ratio of the SUT, but maybe I am wrong; the 834P might have an active gain sufficient to deal with an LOMC without a SUT.
And finally, you guys might look back at the first several responses to this post. Typically, you want the input load resistance to be about 10X the internal resistance of the cartridge. Since the Hana SL has a 30 ohm input resistance, theory suggests it should be loaded with at least 300 ohms. Of course, you can go much higher, as well. And if you go lower, nothing explodes; but lower load resistances will tend to roll off the highs and eventually to sink some gain to ground, which means the cartridge will start to waste signal voltage.
chili555, The most likely reason that your Hana sounded poor when you removed the SUT was not due to load but due to insufficient gain into an MM input. Maybe that's what you meant.