Is it possible for a record to be too loud?

To further what Diggory has said, in the cutting process, it is impossible to overload the cutter system. The dynamic constraints exist in playback only. It is the engineer's job to understand what can be played back easily and what cannot.

However I have a copy of the LP in question and it plays fine without compression or mistracking (Triplanar and a Grado Sonata). This suggests that your setup is not optimized- the mechanical resonance of the arm and cartridge together should be between 7 and 12 Hz, else you can have mistracking problems.

Another thing that can contribute to this issue is cartridge loading. With moving coil cartridges the effect of loading occurs at Radio Frequencies. However if your preamp is sensitive to RF the effect of loading can be dramatic, and you have described what it can sound like if there is a loading problem.

Thanks for the advice, making me feel a little less crazy.

After posting this I spent a good few hours going down the compliance rabbit hole only to find out that all of the manufacturers weight measurements were way off and my cart/headshell/screw were spot on where I wanted the whole time. At first I thought I was running a bit heavy, around 6hz, but after throwing everything on my scale there was a whole 10g difference from the specs I was using to calculate.

What's the gain you're using with your cartridge? 1.05 mV is quite high for a MC cart and would overload the phono stage at most MC gain settings. If a record is cut hot on top of it, it would only exacerbate the problem.

55 db, I think. It sounds fantastic on every other record I own, but heck that could be why. Would definitely fill out the sound a little bit if it were over driven.

A moving coil phono section that overloads with 1mV from the cartridge is a phono section with poor overload characteristics, FWIW.