My cartridge (number 2) in particular didn't sound great.

I made a bit of a mistake recording the records to tape before digitising them. This masked some of the obvious harshness and miss tracking that could be heard when played "live"

Sat here listening to them I would put them 1,3,4 and then a big gap 2.

Yea unless you have a Nakamichi cassette deck that is calibrated, the tape would have to cause a little loss, depending on how you set the bias.   My tapes sound exactly like the record but many tape recorders mute the high end some (not due to dolby) but do to over bias for the tape being used.

You can get a gizmo for like 30.00 that will allow you to pipe directly from your turntable into a USB port on the computer.   It works pretty good, probably better than from record ==> Tape ==> computer

Miss tracking?   You have a tangential TT, I can see maybe a worn needle riding too deep in the grooves or bad suspension.

 

 

It was recorded on a Beocord 9000 and I ran tape calibration for the Chrome tape so it should sound as good as possible but tapes even on a Nakamichi don't sound quite as good as the original, you are pretty limited with a tape speed of only 1 7/8 ips, it is always a compromise. And each tape manufacturer adds their own 'colour'.

All styli will miss-track at some level, (even the very best cartridges costing thousands) especially with very high amplitude sounds and records recorded 'too hot' it all depends on how well the engineer understands the limits of vinyl I guess and the compliance of each individual cartridge. The tangential method used on the beograms is good but far from perfect, the stylus is always slightly out of alignment (causing slight phasing issues) and is constantly corrected, then out again, and corrected.... and so on and so on. I prefer tangentials for the lack of tracking error but they are far from perfect. 

The second file I recorded was fed directly into my computers soundcard via the Beomaster 8000 so doesn't have any of the tape artefacts added.

Lee 

If you have a tape deck in which you can manually adjust bias and also azimuth the tape is very very close to original much more so than tape decks without this feature.    A/B test on my NAK are much closer to sounding the same as source than your 4 carts were in sounding the same.

But direct feed to computer is the way to go.    I think you know something is up with that one cartridge though.   Can't beat the live source.