Is it the cable or the cartridge or????

Thanks all for the input.......I do have the TT grounded so I suspect that you all are correct and it is the Nordus....My past cartridge was the Benz M2 good but not in the league of the Helikon (MHO) it had a higher output so I never noticed a hum.....Franks thanks for the offer...I want to post a follow-up in the cable section to see what other cables are out there....I may be back to you, however.....THANKS to all!

I agree with herman, you need to use a sheilded cable for the phono interconnect. Your also losing some transparency and detail as the EMI and RF cause a "haze" over the sound that you don't notice until the cable been replaced. Look at any dedicated phono cable and you'll notice that their all shielded for this reason. If your not running a ground wire from the tonearm to the preamp, I would try this first as this may rid the specific hum you describe, but your still left the EMI/RF issue. With my TNT/JMW10 I have never needed the ground wire when used with a shielded cable.

If you like nordost cables, the expensive quatrofil is sheilded and would be excellent as a phono cable. If your looking for an inexpensive alternative I have a Discovery interconnect, that I was using as my phono cable up for sale on Audiogon (no, not the reason for the post; well, maybe a little) for $100 but for a fellow VPI/analog guy I'll drop it to $75 with free shipping. I'm currently using Silver Audio's silver breeze(dedicated phono cable) which is excellent and highly recommended. Yes, it is better than the discovery cable, but goes for $400. Check out their web site , Silver Audio.com. Happy listening

Try the suggestions above but also realize that some cartridges hum with the VPI setups - Grado even makes a special line for the VPI's to prevent hum. I have an Aries and there were just some cartridges I needed to avoid - I am not familiar with the Helikon. You may want to call someone at the Elusive Disc for more input on this. What were you using before?

What about the ground. You should check the ground and use separate wire to connect between the ground binding posts from tonearm(tonearm box) to phono.

You should be using a shielded cable from the turntable to phono preamp. The signal level from the cartridge is very low so the gain of the preamp is very high. Any noise picked up by the cable will be easily heard. The blue heaven has no shielding so it easily picks up noise.