They can hum for fun, try moving the deck as far as you can from all other equipment, the horizontal coil will pick up shit from anything electrical, also they are fussy about arm wire and shielding, and earthing. Good luck in sorting it. Lots of Decca fans on Lencoheaven so might be worth a search there
Cheers, have posted a grovelling request for help over there.
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Panic over it was the phono stage, after swapping around the tag connections I tried my remton stage and it works fine.
Weirdly if I only connect one channel to the Whest and short the other it plays fine, after doing this with both channels I tried the Remton.
Very bizarre as it works fine with the IQ3 MM cart.
But fuck me this sounds good, absolutely sings with a bit of Lack of Afro playing 
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Nice one 
No going back nowā¦
Once bittenā¦ love my Decca.
For the money nothing comes close IMO.
The Decca has a common earth for both channels. Early ones have only 3 cartridge tags and you have to connect both earth leads in the arm to one tag.
2 of the pins on current Deccas are connected together, maybe the phono stage which doesnāt work actually inverts the conventional connections???
Iāve got one of the 4 pin carts, someone on lencoheaven said that the Decca needs a common ground in the phono stage and the Whest being a dual mono may not have that. Doesnāt bode well for the new Whest as that is dual mono as well 
Remember, if itās not inconvenient, itās not audiophile.
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Decca made a matching arm suitably wired for their cartridge. The way the cartridge works is unlike others. In fact they took their mono cartridge, with its very direct lateral sensing system, gave it some vertical compliance and added a vertical sensing coil. That means the output needs to be sum for one channel and difference for the other.
It makes little compromise for shit pressings or dust (or other practical considerations) but is massively closer to an ideal transducer for tracing the grooves than conventional cartridges, almost all of which are developed from the original pickups whose design is very compromised in terms of being an accurate transducer in order to make life easier for record makers.
Of all parts of a record player the conventional cartridge is the most shite in concept.
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Indeed, and it would be really interesting to try a Decca-like that avoids the obvious flaws, such as the poor build quality, lack of rigidity etc. Has anyone tried the modern ones that are meant to do that?
As they are, I find the Decca to be flawed genius, which for me is a real compliment. The worst thing possible is dull competence, and I canāt afford the exquisite!
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I have considered one of the top London models but I donāt play LPs often enough to justify that price.
Build quality variability is a disaster but rigidity is overplayed in a seismic transducer in the hifi conventional wisdom.
If there are buzzy bits in the cartridge which will vibrate bits that should be stationary there will be colouration (wood bodies sound niceā¦) but since the arm itself will be modal before 1kHz, in many designs around 200Hz, the idea of a ārigidā loop is a misunderstanding of how the transducer is working using static thinking to deduce (wrongly) what is needed in a dynamic system.
