The 'tube-transistor' enigma by MC carts?

@chakster I stand corrected; thanks for posting that link. I've had more than one metallurgist tell me that while 6Ns metals exist, the wire from them isn't actually 6Ns, although it gets called that. Since I do EE work, I went with their expertise.

Mills offers non-inductive wirewound resistors, but we found them prone to noise pickup due to their size, which is similar to the parts in your preamp. The 'special process' is winding the wire back against itself so that inductance cancels.

The odd thing here is that you can see the presence of traces on the bottom side of the circuit board, and it appears that the coil/resistor devices are in series with the signal rather than parallel.

@chakster Just so you know, 6Nines copper wire does not exist. The best anyone has done is 5Nines and that claim seems highly suspect! Another way to look at this is the wire might be extruded from 6Nines copper, but once extruded it won't be 6N anymore. Copper, when unoxidized, has a silvery appearance. When it has a copper color its been slightly oxidized.

The devices at the input of your preamp appear to be coils, not resistors. They are there to suppress RFI at the input; they are in series with the input signal, not in parallel. You can see this if you follow the traces on the board, which are pretty visible in the photo.
A better photo of them would reveal more information, but at the present moment that's how it looks. The low input impedance suggests that a coil could be wound to be a resistor, but one would have to be careful to control inductance, as a high inductance in parallel with the input would be disastrous! It would cause the normal resonance at the input to be lowered in frequency, and perhaps pretty dramatically. We uses non-inductive devices for precisely this reason.

Nandric, I understand that the Transfiguration Orpheus uses a different MC mechanism than the two described above.

Nandric, my understanding is that the bobbin in the Orpheus is round, like the bobbin in a voice coil of a speaker. It is not cross-shaped like the Micro Benz use.

Nandric, I suspect the comparison of different cartridge construction to tube vs solid state is likely a red herring. Tube phono sections do not have to have higher distortion, and some transistor phono sections OTOH can have quite high distortion. There there is also the question of what distortion is important to the ear and what is not. Research has shown that all humans detect distortions in the same way- but that is a topic for another thread.

In phono cartridges, you are also faced with loading issues, and the ability of the tone arm to allow the cartridge to track. These variables play a huge role in the resulting sound you get- Raul is absolutely right as well about the design tradeoffs that a cartridge designer faces, along with the execution. It is not something that can be so cut and dried.