For my Etna, it is 50k" - 50 kohms is unloading, its higher than the standard 47k.You are showing your ignorance Dover. 47K is not standard for a MC and not standard with the Etna Lambda, which I am listening to as I type this. 47K is the standard for MM. Not for MC. We vinyl junkies, for better or worse, refer to lower capacitance as unloading even though you are technically correct. Why is this? Because as you lower loading values, the cantilever is subject to less damping. At the end of the day it is damping and not technical numbers that counts. Someone who knows his stuff wrote this;
The loading that the owner adds is a resistor in parallel to the signal path. That means that the higher the value of that resistor, the LOWER the amount of loading. Higher loading (lower value of the resistor) tends to damp high frequency peaks. With modern cartridges, the peak is usually well into the ultrasonic range, so loading is not needed as much as was the case in the past to correct for peaks. Jonathan Carr, the designer and builder of Lyra cartridges is among those who believe that additional loading is not needed to damp such peaks and it takes away some of the extension and open and airy sound on top. However, even though the peak is outside of the normal hearing range, it can be high enough in amplitude to overload some phono stages. He believes that loading is more important for preventing such overloading than in taming the frequency response of cartridges. I tend to agree with this. I happen to have a phono stage that does not overload and I like to run my MC cartridges (Lyra Titan and Transfiguration Orpheus L) wide open.
Sometimes, loading helps to suppress RF interference. A friend had a Hovland preamp that was passing a lot of hashy noise. It turned out that the factory default loading was 100k (essentially no loading). When we increased loading, the noise went away.
There is absolutely no harm in utilizing any particular amount of loading so one can experiment. I tend to find that higher levels of loading, say any value lower than 100 ohms, makes the sound warmer, more bass prevalent and shut down on top. Also, the lower the resistor value, the lower the total output so that volume level will go down. As a very rough rule, with most cartridges, a load of about 125 to 150 works perfectly well, and no much difference is heard if a higher value resistor (lower loading) than that is used.