theres no fallacy or falsehood, @atmasphere. it is what it is. its not my opinion but the aggregate experience and expertise of folks, especially tube audiophiles, whove tried headamps (or whatever you want to call and additional gain stage between an MC phono cart and the phono amp) and SUTs.
the consensus or near consensus preference is pairing an MC with the appropriate SUT.
@cey There's no consensus. You'd have to do quite a bit of polling to get to that, and no such polling exists. BTW I'm not talking about headamps. I am talking about a phono section that has no problem with a LOMC cartridge running straight in. If we're talking about a headamp I might be inclined to agree with you...
@mgrif104 We don't make stand alone phono sections since there are too many problems with connecting that phono section into the rest of the system. If the phono section is built in, you can eliminate those variables. Our balanced preamps were all designed to be phono reproducers as number one.
The second goal was to eliminate interconnect cable colorations, which is done by running balanced lines both at the tonearm output (where interconnect coloration control is paramount) and between the preamp and amplifier. We've been making balanced line preamps longer than most; the MP-1 was introduced in 1989. To control the interconnect between the amp and preamp we patented a new method of supporting AES48, the balance line standard. Before we did that there were only two ways to do it. Our method employs direct coupling, so a nice side benefit is no coupling caps at the output of the preamp to add coloration.
If I were to recommend a phono section it would be one where the design does not require the user to have to deal with 'cartridge loading' as I mentioned before. I explained why. If a designer includes cartridge loading for a LOMC cartridge, it makes me wonder if they know what they are doing.
It might be that they do and are simply not fighting the myth that LOMC cartridges need to be 'loaded'...