Fussing over a new cartridge installation


I have just installed an Ortofon Super OM20 on my Harmon Kardon T-45 turntable, and am enjoying LP's with an enthusiasm I haven't in twenty years. I have a couple of setup questions, though.
1. The H-K table has a "Capacitance trim" setting. I have found a capacitance listing for the cart, but no such info for the amp (an NAD AV713 reciever). Any advice about this?
2. After setting up the cart (which is an immediate and dramatic improvement on the worn old Grado that preceeded it), I learned that the Ortofon cart has a removable weight. The H-K "Microrace by Ito" tonearm is relatively light weight--would there be any significant benefit to re-installing the cart without the weight?
3. I bought the turntable second hand a few years ago, and the previous owner included a second headshell, from Audio Technica, which appeared unused. I found that the gold contacts on the H-K headshell were too small to fit the prongs on the ortofon cart, so I mounted it in the A-T (non-gold) headshell. It seems fine, but I'm just mentioning this in case there is some advantage to the original headshell or wiring that I should know about.

Thanks in advance for your reply.
bt0a20
1)Set this by ear. The more capacitance, the richer it will sound, the less capacitance, the more extended. You cannot do any harm.
2)No weight.
3)Don't know, but the way to stretch the cartridge clips on the HK is to use a fine awl or a round tooth pick. My take is don't worry about it and enjoy the records.
Thanks very much for the reply, Viridian. Given your last bit of advice ("don't worry about it and enjoy the records"), do you think that removing that weight on the installed cart and redoing all the cart adjustments will be sonically worth the trouble?
Also (more fussing), should I be adjusting the tonearm's height? Is that even possible on the H-K?
Sorry, I was a bit confused. The Ortofon Super cartridges have a kind of gold weight built into the top surface that meets the headshell. Do not remove this weight. It damps the interface between cartridge and headshell and also brings the total weight of the cartridge to a rather minimal four grams or so. There is also a black weight available that does not attach to the cartridge but goes between the cartridge and headshell and adds more weight yet, this is not necessary in your installation. I believe that the T-60 had VTA, but it is so long ago that I don't remember for sure. Usually, if there is a small screw on the arm base pointing to the side away from the platter that is what it is. If you do not have this, there are other ways of adjusting vta, but they involve putting material, such as a matchstick between the headshell and cartridge, tilting the cartridge one way or the other. I really do not recommend this kind of thing, except for those on the neurotic fringe (oh, that's all of us), as it just trades proper VTA for lessened rigidity. What may be easier is making cardboard shims to go under the turntable mat, they would be round, just a bit smaller than a record and would have a hole in the middle. You would put one, or more, of these under your mat to raise the mat up. Of course this will only work in one direction, giving you negative VTA, but this is usually the direction that you want to go in anyway. By the way, your cartridge has an elliptical stylus, which is somewhat less sensitive to VTA than are line contact or Van Den Hul stylii. As tempting as it may be, you should probably avoid upgrading your stylus to the OM30 or OM40 unless you have a reliable way to adjust VTA.
Thanks again. It's sounding good--and a real joy to hear records that I haven't played in more than a decade. I'll leave things be, I guess. I looked at the owner's manual for the turntable and it doesn't mention anything about VTA: I don't see any problem on that front, so I'll let the HK engineering do its stuff. (I don't have experience with recent high-end turntables, but this one seems quite respectabally effective to me.) Thanks for clearing up the bit about the cartridge weight, and for your advice about the Ortofon upgrade path.

One more question, as long as we're at it. The original HK mat is a dense rubber--it almost seems brittle, I don't know whether that is age-related or not, as I purchased this unit used. Would a replacement turntable mat be a sonically valuable upgrade, or is that pretty much "snake oil"?