You’ve got some very nice stuff, good for you buddy. I skimmed through the replies, your hours are low. Capacitors in your components still haven’t formed, the speaker will take even longer 2-3 months typically from my experience. how technical are you? It seems like your cartridge is good enough. I get into my gear a fair bit and enjoy upgrading electronics as a hobby, I fully understand people who don’t. FWIW, if it were my gear, I would - upgrade the Klipsch crossovers, remove those yellow (bennic.Chinese my guess) capacitors and put something a lot nicer, with particular focus on high frequency but especially mid range, Miflex and Mundorf are a few of my favorites. Second, I would upgrade your interconnects and make my own to keep costs in check, make them out of pure silver wire and solder them up with good terminations (RCA or XLR made of copper conductors). Last, I would address the speaker cable, this is a silly area, or people make it silly I find - North American made pure copper of a thick gauge is all that needed and NONE of that “speaker wire” stuff, you cut it and can see it’s copper clad aluminum. Do all that, and leave the equipment on for extended periods even when not listening, it will all mellow nicely and give you what you want. Smaller things could help alleviate, I like your cartridge idea, but won’t address the underlying core improvement areas.
A few have recommended an EQ, in my opinion you do NOT want to do that, introduce more electrolytic capacitors, very likely you’ll kill the sparkle of your nice equipment. On the EAR, I’ve seen some examples of people replacing the electrolytic caps with film on the stage board itself. If it were my phono stage, I would likely bypass all electlytics with Polypropylene MKP on the underside of the board, only maybe considering a straight replacement if the values were small enough where creative size placement would be elegantly done. Some pictures I’ve seen of the ear have though hole film caps, this is better, but still would go with something nice. This would make a profound impact to everything…