Few technical questions about an Ortofon MC cart on a Scout 2...

You need to have the cartridge looked at professionally as suggested above. It sounds like the suspension is damaged.

Dear Al (and others),

So the major switch to 47ohm made a night/day difference. The cartridge and table now sound like they should, barring some minor adjustments.

One question though: so far in my experimenting, it strikes me that the cartridge sounds best - most "open" - with NO capacitance loading engaged. Should I continue to experiment here? I ask because the manual explicitly states that zero capacitance is not recommended.

In the meantime, I've ordered a Shure force gauge to help me re-calibrate the cartridge from scratch.

Excellent!

Regarding capacitive loading, with the possible exception noted below I would ignore that statement in the manual and go with whatever sounds best to you. As I mentioned earlier the capacitive load applied to the cartridge will include the unknown capacitance of the phono cable and tonearm wiring (which is undoubtedly substantial, quite likely 150 or 200 pf or so), as well as the input capacitance of the phono stage (which is certainly not zero even when the so-called zero setting (all of the capacitive loading switches in the up position) is selected. Chances are the "zero" setting is a few tens of pfs.

And the "<500 pf" load capacitance recommendation in the specs for the particular cartridge is not specific enough to be helpful, as of course it could mean anything between 0 and 500 pf.

The exception I referred to is that perhaps the statement in the manual is based on a possibility that setting all of those switches to the up position might somehow adversely affect the sonics of the phono stage circuitry itself, although I can't envision how that might be the case. But **if** you don’t find the sonics of the zero pf setting to be noticeably better than the lowest possible other setting (10 pf) I suppose you might as well use 10 pf.

Enjoy! Regards,
-- Al

I am very much indebted to you, Al, for your thoughtful and very generous assistance.

Thank you!