help with cartridge selection

I have 3 of the 4 carts you mentioned. I will give you a brief description of how they work with my VPI HW jr table and PT-9 arm. I was pleasantly surprised with the M97, it payed all my albums well and tracked like a champ. Good range top to bottom but a bit forward sounding and leans towards bright. It is a good stand-by cart but not sure if I could live with it full time. The V15 has the range of the M97 but a bit more refined, everything sounds better. I can live with this, a good all arounder. The Goldring is the best of the bunch, sounds like an expensive cartridge, plays all the notes, puts all the bad stuff on a record out of ear shot. Tracks with no problems, nice wide, deep presentation. The more i listen to this cart, the more i like it. Keep in mind this is with my set-up.

I agree with Zenblaster. My Goldring had 95% of the quality of my Clearaudio at way less than 1/2 the price. The M97 will sound less refined but who can argue with the price-great backup cartridge.

Check out the Audio Technica AT33 series of high compliance MC cartridges.

No experience with any of those cartridges, or with your tonearm for that matter, but what the cartridges that reportedly perform well on your arm all have in common is fairly high compliance. This makes perfect sense. Your arm is relatively low in effective mass (9.5g according to SME documents turned up by Google searches), which means it was designed for high compliance cartridges.

The Denon 103, OTOH, is a pretty low compliance cartridge. It likes a tonearm of 20g effective mass or higher, and is one of the worst possible matches for 9.5g tonearm.

Changing your bearings would improve the arm in general, but would not normally alter its effective mass. More than that would be needed to get a 103 to play its best. I can't imagine it would be worth the trouble and risk just for that. The 103 is a reasonably good cartridge on the right arm, especially for the money, but there are plenty of good cartridges out there with more suitable characteristics for the arm you actually have. Forget the 103 unless you're prepared to change tonearms. Check out Raul's thread "Who needs MC when we have MM" for many high compliance choices that should perform well on an SME 3009 S2 Improved.

Arm/table matching is fairly insignificant. If the arm fits the table and isn't too heavy for the suspension then you're unlikely to have any issues. I believe your table has no suspension, so for you it's even less significant. Matching of cartridge to arm and cartridge to phono stage are both 1000 times more important. Focus on those.