Thank you all for your information. This is all helpful.
What I'm actually doing is a project with my kid. We are going through some turntables all of various makes and from various eras that people tossed out on the street (to mention some, we found Technics, Bang & Olufsen, Panasonic, Sony and some more). I want build a setup to test them all and just have some fun with my kid. I know I should be changing cartridges, but this is just a project with my kid and we'll also be using a bunch of old records that were also found on the streets.
In due time, once we settle on the turntable we like, we will get into the finer tweaking and optimizing.
If I understand correctly what you are all saying, it might be the best option at this early stage of this experimental project to put a variable resistor there and adjust for each turntable. Then, once we settle on the turntable (and mostly likely change the cartridge) we would replace the VR with a fixed value.
Does that sound like the best approach, for this project?