tt setup problem?

Your cartridge is out of alignment and is only tangent to the grooves at the beginning of the record. First, you need to make sure you have the correct stylus overhang. Then use an alignment protractor to adjust the cartridge in the horizontal plane (by loosening the headshell screws) to make sure you have tangency at two points across the playing area.

The old standard for protractors is the DB Alignment gauge available from Music Direct and elsewhere. There are others that probably work as well, but that's the one I use.

Try increasing the VTF a bit, that might be all you need.

My VTF is at 2.2g which is the top end of the range for my cartridge.
I have a stupid question for Nsgarch. If my cartridge is correctly aligned to the grooves at the beginning of the record, then wouldn't an adjustment to the cartridge to correctly align to the end of the record simply reverse the problem? In other words, now I would have better sound at the end of the record than at the beginning?

Thanks.

Tfk, you would think that wouldn't you, but because of the tonearm offset (the little angle the headshell is cocked at) and the stylus overhang, it is possible using a good cartridge alignment protractor, to adjust the cartridge so it's perfectly tangential to the grooves at two points across the record, with very little error elsewhere.

Go to this thread where I've posted some terrific sites for understanding cart/arm/TT setup:

http://forum.audiogon.com/cgi-bin/fr.pl?eanlg&1138982854&openmine&zzNsgarch&4&5#Nsgarch

It is well known that the inner grooves of an L.P do not track as well as the outer grooves and I would hesitate a guess that you might be hearing this in your sensitive system(There is plenty in Vinyl Asylum archives on this issue).The only thing you can do is to make your alignment as correct as possible,but you will not be the first to notice that the last track on your L.P's does not have quite the same dynamic as the opening track.