It is possible to have no inner groove distortion. A friend of mine has no inner groove ditortion on his old Mission Turntable. It sounded better than the VPI Aries I heard at the dealer. His table is over 20 years old. lol. He is a master at setup. He came over and set my table up. My table sounds unbelievable now. I have a scout. His table still sounds much better than mine. He is using a Lyra Dorian cartridge. I am using a Benz H2. He said that all of the High output moving coil cartridges will not be able to come close to the low output MC's. He said the MM cartridges will have less tracking error purely due to their design. However, the low output moving coils are where its at. Many things made a huge difference. For one, make sure your table is level, another is make sure the VTA is not too high or too low. Azimuth is critical. It is all important. He told me next cartridge I get should be a low output moving coil. The high out moving coils negate the purpose of having a moving coil cartridge so I am told There is too much mass due to the extra windings on the coils restricting the movement of the cantilever in the groove. This is most important on the inner grooves and during complicated musical passages, especially something like a cannon shot on the 1812 Overture. One thing I have come to realize is that I cannot expect miracles from old shaded dogs and Bluebacks and other old lp's. They are just too worn for the most part. Of course unless you are lucky enough to come across a mint copy. Most used records were played on very mediocre tables that were not set up properly, some had quarters on the headshell. However, will proper alignment and setup, these old records can suprisingly sound very good.
