GRADO CARTRIDGE & TONEARM COMPATIBILITY

Your cartridge will either work or it won't. Grados can be cranky cartridges and some people get the dreaded Grado "Dance" whereas others do not on the same set-up. Many people have had success with the RB300 but read my experience below:

I have a Grado Reference Master and it started-out fine on my Denon DP-59L with the straight tonearm. Once it got past 70 - 80 hours of play, the dreaded "dance" started. I moved it over to my Bix turntable that was equipped with an Origin Live Silver MkI tonearm and it still "danced". Tried adding more weight to the tonearm but to no avail. Both these tonearms are fairly close in effective mass to the RB300.

I went the opposite direction and put the cartridge on an Infinity Black Widow (the lightest effective mass tonearm available) and that solved the "dance" problem but the tradeoff was a drop in bass output. I will try adding some mass back to this combo to see if the bass response will pick back up before dancing reappears.

So the moral of the story is "Start with a medium effective mass tonearm as Grado recommends but if you get the dreaded dance effect, be ready to run to a very lightweight tonearm and finetune from there."

Long time previous Grado user. The RB 300 will work fine.

The Kerry Audio Design F2 titanium heavyweight counterweight for the RB300 tonearm allows for even better performance, and no DIY skills necessary.
Well worth picking up if you see an ad. Not certain whether it is still available new from the original Canadian source.

I used a Reference Sonata in a RB300 with excellent results. Go for it!