Anyone with Rhea and Shelter 501MkII?

I have a Rhea and you can load at 75 or 125 ohms but not 100. Close enough.

My experience is not inconsistent with that of Dan_ed but I would suggest the quality of the tubes in your Rhea will be a factor. After spending considerable time finding quiet tubes, I now prefer to run my Rhea at the highest possible gain setting rather than boost the volume. I believe this is consistent with the Aesthetix viewpoint too.

I remember contacting the distributor when I bought mine two years ago. He had both a load and gain recommendation for my cartridge. I think it was someone at Musical Surroundings but I may be mistaken.

Aesthetix recommended a low output cartridges to me (which I assume means higher gain at the phono stage), so that seems right.

LOADING

Your cartridge calls for "20 ohms with step-up transformer", "100 ohms with head amplifier" (yes! that is confusing).

Because your Rhea doesn't use transformers, I'd say your goal is 100 ohms.

Therefore, Set your Rhea at 75 ohms or 125 ohms (the closest you can get to 100). Whichever sounds better.

GAIN

Your cartridge has output voltage of 0.5mV.

This calls for a gain of 56dB. Your Rhea hits this on the nose.

Thanks, Hukkfinn!