What innovative, unconventional cartridge designs can you recommend?

Approximately 50% of the OP is dedicated to DS Audio and plenty of post after are about DS Audio.

This Thread is deliberate in bringing DS Audio into the limelight.

@pindac 

You are correct, and DS Audio is certainly a legitimate and worthwhile topic within this thread.

However, it almost seems as if more attention has been lavished upon Mr. Nixie’s products than DS Audio’s, including the entirety of your 3,000,000-word penultimate thread :)

Mr. Nixie makes only three DS Audio-related products: a €800 pocket-size equalizer that appears to have sprouted an extra zero in its price, and two standalone equalizers - a SS one and a tube one.

I have auditioned none, to be clear, and his two standalone equalizers may very well deserve all the praise they’re getting from certain online forums. But his cigarette pack-sized entry-level offering can probably safely be dismissed, to the extent that it adds an extra box, an extra layer of signal conversion, an extra pair of interconnects, and an extra power supply between the DS Audio cartridge and a conventional MM phono stage that was, obviously, never designed to process the output of an optical cartridge. One is probably better off with a dedicated equalizer, whether from DS Audio or an alternate maker, but that’s just my opinion. 

@audphile1 

I’m sure you know there will be some break in period for the phono stage so don’t jump to conclusions too soon. I would keep it on 24/7 and it should settle in a week or so. 

SoulNote states that the electronics in the E-1 Ver2 Equalizer need an hour's warm-up to reach peak performance.  I need a lot more than that!

Anyway, it is on being warmed up as I write this.  It only consumes 28-Watts so I will leave it on unless I am away for days on end, which is most of the time.

My initial cables will not do it justice, either.  6-meters of microphone cheapo XLRs

Apart from the User Guide, the SoulNote came with a 24 page booklet entitled SoulNote High End Audio Brand which I find fascinating.

Kato, the Chief Engineer, explains that he was instructed

Make SoulNode the best audio brand in the world

To continue to quote Kato

Well, "number one in the world" was Nakazawa's favourite phrase, and while it may seem like a wild idea, I had an idea to make it happen.  We would properly explain the reasons for the "discrepancy between specifications and sound quality", which is the biggest mystery in the audio world, achieving unprecedently sound quality using methods that other manufacturers would not (or could not) use, and present it to the world.  If we could do that, I really thought we could turn the world's perception of value upside down.  I understood the reason for the discrepancy between specs and sound quality, and that is the basis of SoulNote's current design philosophy.

So here is a practicing engineer who goes on to challenge the conventional view of audio as frequency dependent.  To him (and me) it should be time dependent.

Do you really need a 6 meter run of XLRs?

@audphile1 

Do you really need a 6 meter run of XLRs?

No, but I could not buy 5-m ones off anybody's shelf.  Having put 6-m ones in, I find I have 2-m slack, so 4-m would do, just, as I currently have my gear positioned.

Many cable manufacturers stop at 3-m, but 5-m are also available.

I am thinking hard about how I could rearrange my components.  Part of the savings on shorter good XLR cables could go towards a second rack.  Does the expense ever stop?

I will reply more fully in the thread on XLR cables I started, to which you have made very valuable contributions.

By the way, it takes 28-Watts a long time to warm up nearly 10-kgs of phono stage.