Brand new to vinyl: Help!

Thanks @jsm71 !

Another update: I had my dealer come over at my house and install the new cartridge - the Ortofon Bronze - yesterday. I just wanted to make sure it was done right, alignment, weight and all - he brought all tools.

While there was a noticeable improvement (better bass and midrange, and slightly less "bright") to the stock Cocept MM cart, it was not eye popping. Still, I am happy I did it, so that I don't have to upgrade anything now for a while.

In terms of the cables, the Clearaudio Concept comes with "captive" interconnects (they cannot be removed from the turntable). I did buy from Audiogon some good quality gold connector adapters (RCA to XLR) for $35 plus $6 shipping.

And yes @jsm71  my phono stage is built in my Ayre pre-amp - K-1xe. It only accepts balanced connectors on its phono stage inputs.

Truth be told, I have made so many changes with my new analog setup now in such a short period of time, that I should really sit down and simply listen to music for a few weeks without any additional tweaks. I have bought quite a few records locally and through Amazon now, so plenty of (familiar) music to listen to.

Thanks everyone for your help!

Yes, enjoy and I haven't seen a cartridge yet (or speaker) that didn't improve some when broken in.  

Any recommendations for a record cleaning machine? I bought one of those brush cleaners from Amazon, but I think I need a more robust one. Thanks

thyname, A bit of icing is missing from your cake if you are trying to convert the single-ended output of your turntable into balanced mode for your Ayre.  The Ayre phono section will sound best when fed with a true balanced signal. This is not so arcane as it sounds, because all cartridges are inherently balanced devices.  To achieve a single-ended signal from a cartridge, typically the "ground" pin of the cartridge is connected to the shield of a single-ended cable, along with the turntable/tonearm ground connection.  Your hard-wired IC is probably configured this way. A typical single-ended phono stage works fine this way. 

In contrast, a balanced signal consists of two halves, one "plus" and one "minus".  To get the most out of that output with respect to feeding the Ayre, you would want each half of that balanced signal from the cartridge to be carried on a separate conductor where the two conductors are identical.  The typical XLR on a balanced IC carries the plus half on pin2, the minus half on pin3, and the grounds (turntable, tonearm, etc) separately on pin1. Thus, for carrying the phono signal in balanced mode, you want to connect the "ground" pin of the cartridge (which by convention is really the minus half of the signal) to pin3 of an XLR, keeping it separate from TT/tonearm ground (which goes to pin1) and carrying it on its own conductor. The Ayre sounds best this way. (I used to own an Ayre phono stage; I tried it both ways.)  The hard-wired single ended IC on your new TT kind of makes for a problem in achieving that goal.  (There's nothing "wrong" with it, because most phono stages are SE circuits.  You happen to own a rare true balanced phono section.) But meantime, find out if you enjoy vinyl using your new set-up as is, which does sound like a big improvement over the original.  What I am talking about here is, like I said, icing on the cake if you want to go the last mile.  With a little surgery best performed by a knowledgeable tech, you could make the change to optimize the balanced connection, if you perceive you will be moving forward with vinyl.

Thank you very much @lewm !

Definitely something I plan to do down the road, if I am lucky enough to find someone that understands what you wrote and knows what to do