Can a new needle affect the volume?

Hello,

We recently purchased a new cartridge (Stanton 400.V3) for our Garrard AT60 because we were having trouble with the old (original) needle. With the old needle, the sound kept cutting in and out, and after an extensive search for bad connections we determined that the stylus was probably bad.

Well we just replaced it, and the sound no longer cuts in and out. But, now for some reason the volume seems to have been reduced to the point that we need to turn it almost all the way up to get it to a decent level.

I guess I should also mention that we had to solder the leads to the new cartridge since the plastic "plugs-ins" pulled off of the old cartridge as we took it off.

Anyone have this problem before? I admittedly have only a very limited knowledge about this stuff. Any help would be greatly appreciated.

If you soldered the leads directly to your cart as you mentioned there's a good chance you've just destroyed it. You'll want to solder new clips to the wires then slide them onto the cart in the right order. NEVER apply heat to a cartridge. Low volume can be caused by the following: bad cart as mentioned, connections out of order, wrong type of cartridge ie; crystal vs ceramic vs magnetic. If you originally had a ceramic cart and replaced it with a magnetic one then the volume would be very low indeed. You would need a preamp to correct that.