@kvetcha it's all down to these $65 RCA attenuators that dropped my input level into my amp by 10db. Completely opened up the sound, the AVR was being overdriven by the stage, not sure where the fault lies there but now everything has more room to breath and holy hell. I mean I thought it sounded great before, but now... man.
Honestly... could be... I'm not sure if the fault lies in the AVR peaking too easily, the stage outputting too hot a signal, or the cables doing something to the signal that's boosting it. I suspect I'll never get an answer on that, but either way it's fixed and IT'S GLORIOUS.
@Mather Have you checked the input sensitivity on your AVR and compared to the cartridge output x phono stage gain? It is entirely possible to send too loud of a signal to the amp, resulting in clipping.
Glad you got it sorted. I'm similarly happy with my system at this point, though I still would not describe the experience of listening to Titanic Rising as anything close to glorious.
Trust me, I only call it glorious in comparison to what it DID sound like. Compared to like... Anything pressed and mastered well it still gets its clock cleaned.
I'll check that sensitivity, that's a definite possibility. Ort 2M Black into a Rega Aria into an Arcam 550.
Looks like the 550 has adjustable input sensitivity (1V, 2V, 4V). 1V is typical, so I'm guessing that's the default setting. With the 2M Black's 5mV output and the Aria's ~42Db MM gain, you're getting about a ~620mV average from the phono, so you're within spec, maybe a bit hotter than ideal. But depending on the record, it could be peaking above 1V, which would cause distortion.
@kvetcha Thanks for checking that, I was just looking. It's set to 1 RMS now but default was actually 2 and when I was getting the peaking it was happening across 1,2 and 4 RMS settings. But the max input for the Amp is 4.5, and max output on the Black is 5, so maybe that's where this issue occasionally occurred?
Well, the Black's output is 5mV, so only 0.005V. That said, the Aria's rated input sensitivity is a little weird to me - it seems to be targeting 200mV as an output signal, which seems low. Maybe I'm misreading the specs.