4-500 $ cartridge for Project Debut Carbon ?


I recently gifted a niece a Carbon Debut TT with mounted Ortofon Red in hopes of encouraging interest she has shown lately in Classical Music.
It sounds quite good esp. since she's running it through an old Yamaha A-1000 amp with an excellent phono stage(2 actually).Suppose the Caras phono IC i threw in helped as well.
I put on the old Fritz Reiner Chicago "Scheherazade",
which as many of you know, has a huge dynamic range, I was quite surprised the Project took it all in stride with just a slight hardening of strings on those tremendous crecendos.
As she has 94db eff speakers and the A-1000 is powerful I don't think it was clipping. I'm thinking perhaps a better cartridge might do the trick ? Nagoka MP 300 is first thing that comes to mind,but my mind is old and needs help.
schubert
How about a used, hi output, Dynavector 20X. Great cart for the money. I like the sound so much I would be tempted to say get the entry level, 10X5 Dynavector. I imagine the old amp has an MM input so the HO version would be the way to go unless you can get the separate Caras Phono to give MC type gain.
An idea, the amp has both MM and MC inputs, 2 different loads for MC and 3 for MM.
Get a slightly used cartridge, such as dynavector 17d2 or 23rs, Benz Glider, Clearaudio virtuoso or Maestro, or Ortofon 2m Black. While the Dyna 10x5 is a good cartridge for $500, it does not compare to these, which are over $1000 retail but can be found with less than 200 hours, which is nothing. A stylus can easily last 1500 hours and then be retipped. Dont be afraid of used cartridges, they are a bargain and I have yet to purchase one and find that it didnt work or was damaged.
I would do it a little different. Instead of spending it all on a new cart, I would get a combo. For a cart I would look at something like a DV 10x5 or a Shelter 201. Use the rest and get a phono pre from Cambridge, MF, Pro Ject etc.. The reason I would do that instead is upgrading the phono pre may actually be a bigger upgrade than the cart.