Difference in sound using different carts when digitizing vinyl record?

Sleepwalker, what holds the stylus in place? How accurately can it be set? Will it hold its settings?

We can argue forever. But all three are important, plus isolation and plus tonearm cable.

Yes, you will hear a difference, but when you A-B the two digital files, you will be surprised at how minimal the differences are, and how difficult it is to determine which is "better".

@terry you can set up any cartridge perfectly on an average tonearm like Technics Sl1200mkII stock toneam with total cost of $150 (imagine), if you have $30 headshell with azimuth and overhand it's not a big deal to set up a cartridge. An overhand gauge (52mm) supplied by tonearm manufacturer, you can not go wrong with the settings, and it's $150 tonearm! Not a $1500 or $5000 tonearm. These type of cheap turntables works fine for 22 years for me, no problem with bearings or anything technically (definitely not the best turntable, just basic DD anyone can buy). I have much more expensive turntables and tonearms, but on cheap Technics (which is under $500 on used market) the cartridge is far more important that anything else! This is FIRST thing that user should change before changing anything else searching for a good sound from an average turntable with cheap tonearm.  

Many times i've brought some serious cartridge to a friends who owns SL1200mkII. They could not recognize it's still the same turntable, because the sound quality was like day and night even with cheap phono stages, even in the headsphones whatever. Cartridge is number one in analog chain, turntable just rotate the record.  

I've tried everything from $200 vintage MM to $5000 modern ZYX MC cartridge on Technics SL1200mkII just for curiosity. If a cartridge is well matched to whatever tonearm, then it is the biggest upgrade ever... Toneam, turntable, phono stage, some tweaks or even completely different turntable after all is next step.   

@orpheus10 the staircase effect is the result of trying to approximate the analog signal from the turntable into a fixed scale of values that is used when digitizing. That approximation, or quantization, while good enough for some, is still only an approximation that can never faithfully reproduce the infinite number of values that only analog can convey.

If I could use an analogy, consider two ways of drawing a half circle with the flat side facing down.  The first is with a compas, which is pretty much foolproof at making a nice, smooth, linear curve. But what if we had to represent that circle in terms of taking measurements vertically (quantize) in the Y axis, as we move along the X axis? Now, what if we had to map (sample) that curve only in finite increments along the X (time) axis? That sampling process gets only one measure for each whole number value along the X axis, (1,2,3,4,5...). Take those points and plot them as a bar chart. You might say that half circle all of a sudden looks pretty poor. You might say that half circle resembles a staircase as you proceed from 9 o’clock to 12 o’clock and then continue from 12 o’clock to 3 o’clock. That’s what happens when an analog signal is digitized. You can double the rate of sampling to reduce the incremental step sizes, but It still is an approximation that comes with harmonic artifacts as unwelcome passengers.

The choice is yours: accept the obviously noticeable inherent flaws of the quantization process at low sample rates of 44kHz or even 96kHz or make the jump to high resolution digital (DSD) at 192kHz or stay in the analog domain.