Tri-planar vs Graham

Welcome to A'gon, Marco. Even though I have not heard a Phantom I still feel comfortable saying that you can easily flip a coin, or just get either one that happens to be available at any given time on the used market.

The only issue I can think of is to make sure that you have a mounting option that can handle the tonearm wires coming down through a hole, as is the case with the Phantom, and then mating through a DIN connector. The Triplanar tonearm wires are continuous and don't pass through the armboard or plinth.

The cartridge is actually a ZYX Airy3 Gold...

Your Zyx cartridge is a very good match with the Triplanar.

Marco,

As Syntax says, a ZYX cartridge is an excellent match with a Triplanar, PROVIDED the cartridge includes ZYX's optional silver headshell weight. If it doesn't, bass response and macro-dynamics will suffer, because a bare 5g ZYX cartridge is lighter than optimal for a tonearm with an effective mass of only 11g.

The Phantom's effective mass is similar to the TriPlanar's, so the same caveat would apply.

You could address this by adding weight to the headshell. ZYX offers one and so do others, though this may have unknown effects on resonance behavior.

I run the ZYX (Universe) without a cartridge weight on the Triplanar, and the cartridge tracks beautifully- getting image stability that I had previously associated only with reel to reel tape. If you've not heard that, let's put it this way- most arm cartridge setups tend to have a slight amount of waver in the image- tape has that locked in. You might have to hear it to know what I am talking about :)

The Phantom appears to be one of the very few arms that operates in the same league as the Triplanar- we are talking about the best of the best here. Either way one will do well :)