Axelwahl,
Thanks for the further information. I think there is a good possibility that your cartridge is "slightly" defective. The "buzz" on Ortofon is that quality control is not one of their strong points. A misalignment of any of the generating components could account for the channel imbalance (not necessarily related to the cantilever being canted slightly to one side).
An audio shop once leant me a table while mine was in for service. The table had the then top of the line Dynavector. At first, nothing seemed amiss. It was smooth, extended, beautiful sounding, with a huge soundstage. But, to me, it sounded phasey and the images, while large, were quite diffused. I don't have your kind of test gear, but I did experiment. I have a Yamaha DSP-1 ambience synthesizer/recovery system which feeds four channels of ambient information (in addition to the two unprocessed stereo main speakers). One setting recovers out of phase information (Hafler circuit). Playing mono records, this Dynavector had massive amounts of out of phase information where my Lyra cartridge put out virtually none. A cartridge can have "problems" which are not immediately evident.
I wonder if your problem with orchestral crescendi has to do with your channel imbalance issue. It seems like you have correlated these variables because this was the "problem" for which you have a measurement. It sounds more like a mistracking or resonance issue more than anything else. If it is somehow directly related to channel imbalance, I would expect it to be more of an issue with stereo records than mono records. Has that been the case?
