New Lyra Delos Cartridge

I've had a Delos mounted in an ET II since April. Now that it is fully settled in, and I've dialed in tracking wt. at 1.78 grams, I am thrilled with it. I had originally wanted a Kelos but the Delos was available sooner. I'm sure the Kelos sounds better, I just can't imagine how :)

I have a Delos mounted on my new Rega P9 - replaced my P7/Dynavector DV20XH. I am very impressed with this MC cartridge - the amount of music it can dig from the grooves is amazing. I have a Hot Stamper of Joe Jackson's Night & Day - OMG he was in the listening room with me. My phono stage is a built-in on my McIntosh C2300. I am able to adjust the loading with the remote from my listening position. The DV20XH (a nice HO MC)played what was on the stylus - the Delos plays what is in hte groove. I paid $1200 for cartridge when purchased with the P9.

A question for Jonathan : Given the propensity of some for zero bias in favour of excessive VTF (way beyond manufacturers recommendations) how does this philosophy reconcile with the normal Delos/Kleos setup procedure of setting the cart at an average/optimal VTF to centralise the cantilever within the generator?

I have been fighting with loading the Delos. In my setup the only way that I could get it to sound right (meaning neutral spectral balance and tamed transients) was as follows: 1x10 setup ratio, and a 0.5k - 1.5k loading paralleled to the 47k on the tube preamp. The resultant 5 -15 ohm load works. But I had never loaded a cartridge this low before. For that reason I did not trust what I was hearing. I finally stumbled on this thread after I had convinced myself that this was the right answer for my setup.

Reassuring to come to the same numbers and same questions that restock mentioned.

Actually, I am wondering if the settings I mentioned above make sense. It seems that the instruction suggest that 91 ohms is the minimum setting with the Delos. That does not work for me. Too aggressive on the transients, a glare on the natural timbre of instruments. So why am I finding that I need to use these low settings?

I will note that on a solid state phono preamp (a prototype which allows for 67dB of gain) -same arm, wiring and table, the Delos seems pretty insensitive to load. With that preamp (no transformers) anything from 100 to 47k works pretty well.

The setup I am using is a Denon AU-340 SUT (40 ohms setting which is 1x10) into a Audio Innovations P2 phono preamp with a 47k input load. The phono cable is a straight shot of Discovery tone arm wire from the cartridge to the SUT - no other junctions - about three feet.

One thing that I should also mention is that the greater the load, the lower the output from the cartridge. So if you load the cartridge as much I seem to have to do, the input to the preamp drops significantly. This means that with more loading you can actually use a 1x20 ratio without having to worry about overloading the phono preamp.

I use the 1x10 though. But with the P2 phono preamp I can use a 12AX7 instead of a 12AU7 in the second gain stage to make up for the signal loss due to loading.

Any ideas as to why this amount of loading is necessary for me to get accurate timbre and non-aggressive transients?