Absolutely...it's actually the cable capacitance between the screen and core that stabilises the circuit. You'll see that on the '291 card there are not fitted components R16/C7 and R17/C8, those were there to stabilise the circuit, but by absolutely pure luck we found that the cable capacitance did it just as well! By using the neat trick of driving the cable screen from IC1 and IC2.
If you built this as a stand alone circuit with short leads to the gain switch then R16 and R17 would be 649R (replacing R26 and R27) and C7 and C8 would be...quite small? 10pF perhaps?
We were really lucky that the cable didn't put in too much capacitance, if you use leads that are too long you will start losing a bit of the high end.
Cheers,
Andy
