Upgrade My Denon DP80 Tonearm

LOL, off your meds again, sister? Maybe Dionne Warwick can divine who you are speaking to.

I can only speak to the three Denon boards that I have for my plinth which are reversible. So perhaps misinformation on my part as the OP may have a different Denon plinth, and the OP may have his arm board drilled differently than the Denon spec. And for that I am deeply contrite. I can admit when I am wrong rather than crying like a little hurt baby.

I am simply trying to help, rather than cluttering up the board with the 100th picture of that ridiculous turntable and accompanieing self-aggrandizment. 

@laaudionut I have long wondered the pros and cons of tonearm lengths and shapes. Is it purely aesthetics and/or clever marketing?!

Neither. Longer tonearms keeps the cartridge stylus pointed straighter than shorter tonearms when traversing it’s arc, but more mass weighs more and increases cost. Generally speaking, the sonic differences between a say 9 inch vs a 12 inch may be unnoticeable to minor, so it’s a personal subjective preference on which is best within budget.

@laaudionut 

If you are looking for a new tonearm you need to be aware that many vintage and some new arms do not have offset vertical bearings. That is the vertical bearings do not align with the headshell offset.

This means that when VTA is adjusted ( lift the arm up or down at the back ) on  arms with non offset vertical bearings, the azimuth goes out - and the cartridge ends up leaning over laterally to one side.

If you look at the 3 arm Victor TT picture above you can see that the Mission tonearm has offset vertical bearings that match the headshell offset. The other 2 arms on that turntable do not.

I would never buy a tonearm with non offset bearings, even though some of them do have adjustable azimuth, because changing VTA between records becomes a nightmare, you have to correct the azimuth every time you change the VTA.

If you feel the need to increase effective mass of your present tonearm, there is always the strategy of adding weight to the headshell or just buying and using a heavier headshell.  I have long been touting the Ortofon LH9000 headshell, which weighs 18g, for this purpose.  I too own a Denon DA307 tonearm, and its headshell is very light weight, less than 10g.  I think it was aimed at MM cartridges with high compliance. So if your headshell is similar or identical, you may well benefit from one of the two strategies to increase effective mass, without the expense and labor required to buy a different tonearm and mount it.  The DL103 cartridge has a notoriously low compliance. I know a local guy with a very elaborate system who nevertheless is hooked on the DL103; he runs it in a massive bespoke tonearm which by the looks of it may have an effective mass of 50g.

My local HiFi store back in the late 1970's used a Denon TT with the 307 arm and stock Denon head shell. Cartridge was the DL103. The combination sounded excellent! So the idea that the 103 cartridge needs a high mass arm is not true.