Accession MM Capacitance/Loading Settings

How many hours does your LVB have? If it's new, the bass might improve by itself with some more hours of playing and the suspension slightly loosening up.

Human hearing is a funny thing. I've experimented a bit with headphones tuned to preference curves and digital EQ correction with digital music playback.

If I take frequencies at 2.5K, 5K, and 10K and boost them all to create a massive +5dB to +8dB bubble, some folks might "hear" that as a thin sound lacking in bass frequencies. In actuality, I have done nothing to the bass frequencies at all.

The same thing can happen with a wrongly loaded cartridge IME. Big peaking at those frequencies can cause the listener to zero in on those aspects and not "hear" what is going on in the lower frequencies.

If you have a cable from a manufacturer with mystery specs you have no idea how the cartridge is actually being loaded. One popular tonearm company is telling people to buy an upgrade cable with 340pf. Another "high end" cable company sells a phono cable with over 500pf. Good luck trying to use any of these things with today's MM and MI cartridges.

Take an MM or MI cartridge and change the cantilever thickness, the cantilever material, the diamond profile, etc. and that may shift the peaking into a different territory.

A few years ago there was a big trend to take modestly priced MC cartridges and upgrade them with cantilevers and diamonds far away from the original factory spec. A popular one was a very thin ruby cantilever with an extreme FG stylus profile. When some users got their cartridges back they raved about the sound, while others claimed the sound had changed to "screaming bright" and quickly put the cartridge up for sale. Few if any people provided before and after measurements of the changes.

Anyway, audio problems can be difficult to diagnose over the internet. Something that might take 10 minutes in person could take hours or days to figure out over a message board, especially if the person with the problem doesn't have key info at hand or a basic way to verify what's going on.