While waiting for repair of my Dynavector Karat 17D3 and Zu/Denon Dl-103 I am using my Cartridge Man MMIII with my VPI Scout Signature turntable. It is a very nice sounding cartridge but it really exxagerates LP noise, to the point where some of my albums are unlistenable. Is this cartridge just a bad match for my player, is this normal for this cartridge, or is there some set-up trick I am missing. I recently re-aligned it, used my digital scale to perfect the tracking weight, corrected the azimuth, experimented with numerous VTAs and decoupled it from the tonearm with a thin slice of Herbie's Audio Labs Grungebuster. The overall sound improved once I had it really dialled in, but the exxagerated surface noise was still there. On newer, cleaned, well-pressed LPs the noise is not noticeable, but when there is surface noise it can't be ignored. My other two cartridges did not have this problem.
Do I need to clean all my LPs to actually enjoy this cartridge? Perhaps I need to get the cartridge man isolator. It gets rave reviews when used with this cartridge. Maybe it really completes it? The Cartridge Man Classic cartridge includes it, so that is telling...
