You have a good cartridge, a good turntable, a good integrated amp,and good speakers. The one weak link that pops is the Mac's phono stage. Before you move to a low output MC cartridge, try to see what a quality phono stage would do with your current 2M Black, which is a great-tracking, great-sounding, high performance MM cart.
Maybe you could mail order a good phono stage and use their 30-day trial period to see how much it livens up your musical presentation. Or check with a local shop and see if they'll loan you a trade-in or demo model as proof of concept. Or maybe an audio buddy could slide one in to see. I suspect that lots of phono stages would outperform your Mac phono stage even if you keep the cart.
You might look into a Jolida JD9 mk II as they're reasonably priced for their performance, very good sounding, have multiple gain settings, and lots of settings for resistance for MC and capacitance for MM carts. The JD9 would handle any low, medium, or high output cartridge you might have now or in the future.
You might try to chase down a MAGI Phonomenal phono stage. It's MM, MI, and HOMC only, but it's a handwired tube unit for about a grand that's been favorably compared to the Manley Steelhead. I was lucky to have an audiobuddy who wanted to sell his; there aren't many out there. It brought my system to a new level, and I too have a high performing MM cartridge, the Audio Technica AT150MLX.
Maybe you could mail order a good phono stage and use their 30-day trial period to see how much it livens up your musical presentation. Or check with a local shop and see if they'll loan you a trade-in or demo model as proof of concept. Or maybe an audio buddy could slide one in to see. I suspect that lots of phono stages would outperform your Mac phono stage even if you keep the cart.
You might look into a Jolida JD9 mk II as they're reasonably priced for their performance, very good sounding, have multiple gain settings, and lots of settings for resistance for MC and capacitance for MM carts. The JD9 would handle any low, medium, or high output cartridge you might have now or in the future.
You might try to chase down a MAGI Phonomenal phono stage. It's MM, MI, and HOMC only, but it's a handwired tube unit for about a grand that's been favorably compared to the Manley Steelhead. I was lucky to have an audiobuddy who wanted to sell his; there aren't many out there. It brought my system to a new level, and I too have a high performing MM cartridge, the Audio Technica AT150MLX.