Best Way for my TT to reach my Pre-Amp!?

Think of it this way craigert, electricity is like water. The signal coming out of a component is like the water coming out a pipe. In order for the water to do work, blast off the driveway say, it takes a lot of pressure. That's voltage. But you only have so much water coming in from the street. That's your power supply. This is why components like amps that use a lot of power, they have their own private reservoir called caps. Big amps that drive speakers have huge reservoirs, able to supply water to thirsty speakers. Small amps like a phono stage have very small ones, barely enough to sip through a straw.

Now the music signal, its not a nice steady flow but instead is one powerful surging pulse after another. In order to get a drum whack to sound right, its like trying to blast a rock off your driveway. What do you do? Hold the hose wide open? Then you lose all the pressure. But put your thumb on the end, pressure goes way up, now the stream has all kinds of pressure, blows the rock right off. 

Your thumb is impedance. High impedance, high resistance to flow, high pressure, high transient response. Low impedance, low resistance to flow, source component runs out of gas, drains the bass and dynamics right out of the music.

Yeah its more colorful and metaphorical than technically correct, but more than good enough to see you through. 

Just about any but the cheapest stand alone phono stage will blow away every phono card ever made. Any.

I either don’t follow or don’t agree. As a designer, if i have a high quality power supply, box, and attendant hardware already there, for free --- making a superb phono board is relatively easy and inexpensive - I can deliver $1500 performance for $500, even being lavish with components.
Nothing changes except an independent box has vastly more cost, and a bunch more wires and plugs to degrade the sound. And take up space. Oh, and the fancy faceplate you can point to.
There’s a reason for stand-alone phonos, but they are not automatically superior in any way.

For the record my dedicated phono stage, plug-in card and preamp with integrated phono were all the same circuit. Not similar, same. Once i optimized it, what was i supposed to do, make one worse just so they were different? It didn’t save any appreciably money (unless i went to a cheap-ass design, and guess what -- that still doesn’t save that much, the PCB is the single largest cost anyway - if you make them in the USA)

A couple of thoughts.

You might be getting lost in the weeds a bit with all this talk about impedance matching.  The Nagaoka cartridges are MM cartridges and they should work with most any MM phono preamp.  Unless you get something really exotic, most phono preamps should work with the Marantz.  I have a Nagaoka MP-500.

I wouldn't go crazy on a phono preamp, the Marantz is going to be a limiting factor in terms of ultimate sound quality.  You can spend a few hundred (not sure what your budget is) and get better sound quality than the built in phono pre in the Marantz, but your turntable and the Marantz are only going to take you so far in terms of sound quality.  If you want to try tubes, try one of the Pro-ject offerings, or something like the Parks Puffin if you want to go solid state.  I think anything beyond that might be a waste of money for your current setup.

Let me start out by thanking the OP for starting this thread. I’m a relative noob to all this and will be adding a phono stage to a receiver(Oulaw RR2160) as well. Which I think would be the best solution for you if you just don’t lengthen the cables. I’m learning quite a bit from this thread. For the record I’m looking into mostly tube phono stages and will most likely move into a integrated amp a year from now.

For the money, it’s hard to beat the Schiit Mani and Blue Jeans LC-1 low capacitance RCA cables, and will far exceed the built-in phono stage of your receiver. Been there, doing that.