looking for advice to mitigate inner groove distortion

Greg, the saving grace of Stevenson alignment is low distortion at inner grooves, compared to the two popular alternatives. One could argue about alignment all day but I strongly doubt that misalignment or Stevenson alignment can account for this problem. I’m now wondering whether motor is interacting with the cartridge as the two get closer to each other. To test this, with the platter spinning, pick up the tonearm and holding it above the platter but close as possible to it bring it over toward the spindle with volume control fully advanced.

Yeah lewm I also can't think of any alignment issue that puts a halo around horns. While I would like to nail down the overhang situation the halo and crescendo comment sounds more like mis-tracking to me. 

Adam, maybe double-check VTF and if not max maybe try a little more.

I also suspect mistracking ... bit if it is then there may we’ll be groove damage and in that case nothing will fix it. Is this just on one album, or on many, including brand new ones?

Just get $100 new cartridge and try it with it. We can't see or hear what you do. It's inexpensive experiment.

lewm

One could argue about alignment all day but I strongly doubt that misalignment or Stevenson alignment can account for this problem.

It's much easier to get phono cartridge alignment wrong than it is to get it right. If LPs exhibit inner groove distortion, alignment is the first place to look if you want to be methodical. You're likely to be just chasing your tail if you don't first confirm that the alignment is correct.

A distortion analyzer can easily show the results of a misaligned phono cartridge.