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Soundmind is right.

Some phono cartridges are sensitive the the capacitance of the phono cables and/or preamp. My Quad 44 preamp has the option of switching to add 180 picofarads to the phono load, and with one cartridge, this introduced a drop of 4-5 dB at 16 kHz. I measured this using the meters on my tape deck and an old equalizer. Naturally, I used the "0" pf setting with that cartridge! So yes, the capacitance of the phono leads CAN affect the frequency response fairly drastically with many cartridges. As I understand it, the FR of Grado cartridges is little affected by capacitance.

(I mentioned this once to someone who thought he was something of an expert on phono matters who argued that the drop that high wouldn't be enough to make much difference to the sound--he not realizing that it would not be a brick wall drop but that this was the result of a gradual falling off in frequency response beginning much lower than 16 kHz!)
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