Audio Technica ART9 sounds awful

^^ Yes, it must be faulty, mine sounded good from very start.

Are you sure the arm and cartridge are compatible with each other? What is the mass of the tonearm?

The soundstage is shifted to the left. I never heard either situation from the 10x5...

Well it would seem that there is something wrong here, either with the cartridge itself or installation/setup.

+ yogiboy.

I searched to find the effective mass of your tonearm and cannot find it.  The problem with the ART9 is that it has a very high compliance rating of 32 @ 10Hz.  That would mean it should be matched with ultra low mass tonearms to avoid unwanted and very low resonances.  That could explain the tubbiness in the bass.  Your arm does not look to be ultra low mass and could simply be a mismatch.

The compliance rating of a cartridge does matter and cartridge manufacturers seem to take it more seriously than tonearm manufacturers as both specs must be known.

 

In addition to the tubby bass and the shifted soundstage, is imaging vague and diffuse?  If so, it would be suggestive that + and - may be reversed on one channel, either within the cartridge or in your connections to it. 

A means of checking for that possibility that may be more convenient than changing cartridge connections would be to swap + and - at one end of one speaker cable.

Also, I'm wondering about anti-skating, which might be more critical than with your previous cartridge as a result of the ART9's higher compliance.  When you view the cartridge from the front while it is in the groove of a rotating record does the cantilever appear to be deflected significantly to the left or the right, relative to the nominally straight ahead position it should have when the stylus is lifted off of the record?  If so, you may want to readjust anti-skating per the procedure described in my two posts dated 4-11-2016 in this thread.

Regards,
-- Al