First, my apologies for this thread going OT...
Zieman, perhaps a discussion of cables is appropriate here.
Cables have what is known as 'characteristic impedance'. This value is an impedance such that when the cable is terminated with this impedance, there will be no reflections in the cable. The characteristic impedance of any cable is a combination of its resistance, capacitance and inductance, plus dielectric constants, lead spacing and geometry. The formula for predicting this value is a bit tricky, and measuring it is best done on a Time Delay Reflectometer.
The place where this cable quality really comes into play in audio is speaker cables, not so much interconnects. There is a termination standard in place for balanced line (600 ohms) but for single-ended there really isn't a standard (although single ended cables would benefit from one). This lack of a standard causes single-ended cables to exhibit audible artifacts, which has given rise to the high end audio cable industry, and is the primary reason we decided to produce what was at the time the first balanced line preamplifier for home audio.
The termination of the cartridge at the input of the preamp will also take care of most cable issues. The reason I stress doing the loading properly is I have seen audiophiles compensate for a bright amplifier, amp/speaker mismatch, poor room acoustics and the like by messing with the cartridge loading. The problem is, you can't get it right and the result is often blamed on other equipment which is not at fault.
You can set the load for the cartridge by ear- to do so, you need a variable resistance across the input of the preamp, which starts out very high. It is then decreased (noting that there will be less high frequency energy as this is done). If any change in volume is detected you have gone too far. This is a less accurate technique but IME I have not seen the cable play a role in the final value.
