Analog Upgrade - Where to start?

As you see, us audiophiles don’t have very strong opinions on this stuff lol. From here, the only way to add clarity to your particular situation will be to try something. Maybe you’ll fall into the camp of Raul and friends, who like clean SS phono stages and fast, clean, neutral, does-everything-well cartridges like Ortofon A90 or Van Den Hul Colibri - it’s very fine sounding gear; nothing wrong with that! Or maybe you’ll swoon to fat sounding tube phono stages, full bodied SUTs, and cartridges with softer-sounding-than-neodymium magnets e.g. Koetsu (as I do, most of the time). Or maybe you’ll have the most fun mixing and match from both sides! Only you can answer now.

I think everyone’s impressed by your table & arms, so at least that hasn’t come under the gun (yet), lol. And personally I’d love to try a Dynavector XV-1s (alnico magnets, etc). I’ll be shocked if that ends up being the weak link, unless it’s worn.

At the risk of totally being off track here, and not to diminish the high likelihood that a cartridge change will indeed give the OP what he is looking for, does anyone think the combo of Pass XA60.8 and Avant-Guard a strange one? I clearly don’t know AG speakers well enough to know if they like high current SS amps but I do know they are highly efficient and to me that usually suggests tubes as a better (but potentially noisier) choice.  Are there impedance curves a better match with SS?

One problem I have had selecting cartridges in the past is that nobody seems willing to let you do a home trial … I can understand why. Each system and room is so idiosyncratic that I don’t see how you can select a cartridge without trying it in your system, especially those +$5,000 cartridges.  That is a lot of money to spend when you can’t know how it will sound in your system/room.  How do you overcome this?

I think you have to go with some generalizations to point yourself in your preferred direction.  As @mulveling describes earlier there are the vDH, A90, Lyra type carts and then there are the Koetsu type.  I would put SoundSmith somewhere in between that continuum.  If to have the right arm and phono stage you should be able to try those different types and see what you like.  Start used lower in the line and go from there?

Dear @karl_desch  : The OP speakers  works at around 10 ohms impedance except for two peaks, one at the midrange resonance frequency ( 53hz. ) and one at 19khz resonance tweeter.

The 60.8 is really fine with those speakers and is very good design. Along the speakers exist two OP system subwoofers.

Main " problem "  seems to me is not down there for what the OP is looking for.

R.