I had a Transfiguration Orpheus that sounded wonderful in my Triplanar. One day one channel was dead for no reason so I had to send it back. In the meantime I had no tunes.
Jonesing, I realized that I had a brand-new Grado Green (a $35.00 cartridge) sitting in a box. 'Why not try it?' I thought... the Triplanar is very adjustable and I knew that effective mass is a big deal with Grados (which is why they don't work in the Graham 2.2 which I had for quite a while...). So I went through the setup procedure and to my surprise the cartridge tracked everything I threw at it effortlessly.
The only issue I ran into was that it needed loading, after some experimentation I loaded it at about 10K ohms, after which the only way I could tell it from the Transfiguration was due to the fact that the Grado had higher output.
The lesson was that getting the cartridge to track correctly is far more important than what cartridge it actually is. If your amp has any marginalities in accomplishing that task with your cartridge you are going to hear differences (and the results will be all over the map). So I place the tone arm as number 1 in the hierarchy, the turntable number 2 and the cartridge last.
