If “the hum is louder than the signal” you may very well just have a break in the ground connection going from the cartridge to the amp. Those wires and the pins that connect them are very fragile.
Many mono cartridges play stereo records just fine in terms of raw output. But the compliance problems cause them to eat stereo records for breakfast (even with a brand new stylus). If you put on a test record and after a couple plays it looks like it’s covered in dust STOP and find another cartridge. One of the better stereo ones with the outputs combined, preferably. A GOOD ceramic cartridge, while not as gentle on records as a good hyper elliptical three quarter gram moving magnet, is plenty useable for day to day record play. Back in the tube days, most of them were pretty good. More modern ones they used on BSR’s and such, with cheap IC amplifiers behind them, were hell on records. Marketing at work - they wanted you to buy a more expensive stereo.
Many mono cartridges play stereo records just fine in terms of raw output. But the compliance problems cause them to eat stereo records for breakfast (even with a brand new stylus). If you put on a test record and after a couple plays it looks like it’s covered in dust STOP and find another cartridge. One of the better stereo ones with the outputs combined, preferably. A GOOD ceramic cartridge, while not as gentle on records as a good hyper elliptical three quarter gram moving magnet, is plenty useable for day to day record play. Back in the tube days, most of them were pretty good. More modern ones they used on BSR’s and such, with cheap IC amplifiers behind them, were hell on records. Marketing at work - they wanted you to buy a more expensive stereo.