He's not correct about common passive SUT including mine. They are designed to give appropriate gain and RIAA EQ curve to feed a MM phono input on the preamp/amp/receiver.
Quote from Vinyl Engine:
MC (moving coil) cartridge, it’s more complicated. The characteristics you should take care of for this kind of cartridge to be correctly exploited by your system are:
The output level, measured in millivolts
The internal impedance, measured in ohms
The load impedance, measured in ohms too
In this paper, we’ll ignore high output MC cartridges that can be used with a MM input and concentrate on MC cartridges with an output of less than 1 mV. (The output level of MM cartridges is between 2.5 and 7 mV).
The job of a step-up transformer is to raise the output of the MC cartridge in order for that output to be correctly handled by a MM phono section. At the same time, the step-up transformer adapts the impedance of the signal produced by the MC cartridge to an impedance that can be “read” by your MM input. You must understand that step-ups all have different characteristics that we’re about to explore. These characteristics are such that if you select a step-up and a MC cartridge at random, your probability of obtaining a happy marriage is close to zero.
So please, don't make a definitive judgment of a step-up or a MC cartridge. Before saying “this step-up is pure BS” or ”this cartridge is pure BS”, check the compatibility of your MC / step-up combo. Most of the time, if the sound isn't good it’s because of a compatibility problem.
So, you need to amplify the signal output from a MC cartridge? In fact, you use can two different kind of devices to do that job:
active devices : head amplifier of MC section on a phono section
passive devices : step-up
