Budget Cartridge: Grado Green vs Ortofon 2M Red

Where's Grimace with the Shure M97? His favorite budget. Personally, I like Goldring. Ortofon OM 5 is great because you can just buy a better stylus to go up to the 10 or 20.

Are you refering to the Goldring Elan? I pulled the trigger on the Red 2M. I'm a sucker for the new packaging of old technology. I've heard it sounds "divine" though. We'll see.

I'm personally not sold on uber expensive cartridges just yet, considering my recent happening with a Goldring Eroica, but thats another topic.

I have a Techniques SL10 tangential table that was dormant for about 20 years. With all the talk about analog, I put a Grado Green into it a reved it up. It sounds terrible! I was hoping that it was the cartridge, but wondering if it might be the turntable.

The Grado shouldn't sound that bad? I can't say that's the best table but, it could be a variety of things: phono pre, cartridge set-up, table set-up, power...
My Sota is 20 years old and sounds amazing even with my Shure m91, Ortofons sounded good, a Goldring 1012 was really nice, now that I'm on a Clearaudio Beta S, I'm done.
Again, using everything through a PS Audio UPS 200 makes a difference. My Cambridge 640 phono pre made a nice difference too over my Classe pre with phono or my Sherbourne with phono. And then again, cables make a difference.

However, I'll stress that table, arm and cartridge set-up make the main difference. A 10,000 cartridge will sound like garbage if set-up poorly.