Brand New Vinyl Static and Pops

It sounds like this is a combination of two things- a cartridge problem and perhaps also setup.

The cartridge could have been dropped and the magnet knocked out of alignment. This can cause all kinds of weird stuff while the cartridge looks fine. Since the muffled quality is in both channels this is a possibility.

I'm not sure how setup would cause the cartridge to sound muffled, but certainly it can cause mistracking, which manifests as ticks and pops in loud passages as the cartridge loses contact.

@jjbeason14 I think we need to know what 'flubbing' means in this case.

One thing that can cause ticks and pops is the input of the phono section overloading at ultrasonic frequencies. This is actually pretty common and is caused by the inductance of the cartridge being in parallel with the capacitance of the tonearm cable- the two in parallel set up an electrical resonance.

In this case the resonance is likely barely above the audio band. It can be as much as 20dB so tracking noise can be boosted quite a lot above the audio signal so the phono section can overload.

Your old cartridge had the same inductance though. So this may not be the reason you're experiencing this. Do you make any other changes- different tonearm cable or the like?