Spencer,
Bombaywalla has/had a CAT SL1 Signature MkIII. You can read his review on Tubes Asylum. Maybe he can advise on how it handles lower output cartridges.
My guess is you'll need a stepup, though 20db might be too much. If your line stage is the same as his it has a ton of gain. Both the K&K and the BentAudio's can be wound for 14db. That looks about right for cartridges around .2mv or so.
I haven't heard the K&K's, but I recently had a friend over who owns about 20(!) different stepups. He brought along three of them so we had 4 trannies to try with four cartridges (three ZYX's and a Denon 103).
This guy maintains there's a synergy between tranny and cartridge that goes beyond how "good" or "bad" a particular tranny is. Lord knows he has enough experience to back him up, and he proceeded to prove it as we mixed and matched.
The DL103 liked his Verion/Cotter best.
The ZYX Airy3 really liked a tranny made by some guy in the Netherlands, no name on the box that I can recall. (Whatever it was, I bet it would be a great match for a Shelter 901 too.)
My ZYX UNIverse liked my BentAudio Mu's best. (Woo-hoo! Talk about dumb luck, I usually do system synergy with a random number generator.)
From this one could conclude that the more expensive, revealing and refined the cartridge, the more it wants an expensive tranny. Sounds like a good audio conspiracy theory anyway.
One huge advantage of the Bent's is their facility for quick impedance adjustments. I don't know of another tranny (or phono stage) that makes it so easy to get EXACTLY the loading you need. With some cartridges this has proved indispensable.
BTW, we also tried playing the four cartridges directly into the SS MC gain stage of the same preamp. The stepup sounded better in every case. The lack of grain and glare was very noticeable.
Bombaywalla has/had a CAT SL1 Signature MkIII. You can read his review on Tubes Asylum. Maybe he can advise on how it handles lower output cartridges.
My guess is you'll need a stepup, though 20db might be too much. If your line stage is the same as his it has a ton of gain. Both the K&K and the BentAudio's can be wound for 14db. That looks about right for cartridges around .2mv or so.
I haven't heard the K&K's, but I recently had a friend over who owns about 20(!) different stepups. He brought along three of them so we had 4 trannies to try with four cartridges (three ZYX's and a Denon 103).
This guy maintains there's a synergy between tranny and cartridge that goes beyond how "good" or "bad" a particular tranny is. Lord knows he has enough experience to back him up, and he proceeded to prove it as we mixed and matched.
The DL103 liked his Verion/Cotter best.
The ZYX Airy3 really liked a tranny made by some guy in the Netherlands, no name on the box that I can recall. (Whatever it was, I bet it would be a great match for a Shelter 901 too.)
My ZYX UNIverse liked my BentAudio Mu's best. (Woo-hoo! Talk about dumb luck, I usually do system synergy with a random number generator.)
From this one could conclude that the more expensive, revealing and refined the cartridge, the more it wants an expensive tranny. Sounds like a good audio conspiracy theory anyway.
One huge advantage of the Bent's is their facility for quick impedance adjustments. I don't know of another tranny (or phono stage) that makes it so easy to get EXACTLY the loading you need. With some cartridges this has proved indispensable.
BTW, we also tried playing the four cartridges directly into the SS MC gain stage of the same preamp. The stepup sounded better in every case. The lack of grain and glare was very noticeable.