What innovative, unconventional cartridge designs can you recommend?

Raul and his business partner who did the engineering of the 3160 only sold maybe two dozen of them worldwide. So if you see one on the second hand market, that is unusual, and if you want it, I would not quibble on the difference between $2K vs $3K (or maybe you were talking in GBP). I bought mine "pre-owned" also, for a bit more than $3K. (The cost when new was about $12K!) The rarity is why I don't mention the unit when the subject of "best phono stages" comes up. No use recommending something that probably cannot be found. The standard 3160 has completely separate MM and MC phono circuits, and of course you get a great linestage in the bargain.  Dual mono construction and full balanced operation.

RB, you wrote above, "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." Can you amplify on that statement? Seems to me that frequency and time are not separable.

@audphile1 

I wish I could easily share SoulNote's 24 page branding document, which sets out several design philosophies, some of which are very challenging to old-school thinking.  Maybe your distributor can send you one.

Underpinning everything is the principle that the time domain matters, and frequency domain thinking stuffs up the time domain.

The document is derived from a 12-part series originally in Japanese with a fairy dodgy translation!.  Part 9 is Chassis Structure Affects Sound which includes

SoulNote products have unfixed top panel, unfixed board, unfixed terminal base, and thin and light cable

Part 10 is Physical damping (vibration isolation) blurs the waveform on the time axis.  It also talks about the role of air inside the cabinet, and makes the point that shelves should have openings and racks should be open.

Part 11 is Chassis Resonance with the thought that a monocoque, rigid design has more severe resonance modes than lightweight, loosely connected panels.

The printed circuit board is supported at three points and not fixed.  It is not fixed, but only placed on three pillars without stress, in order not to transmit the vibration of the chassis to the PCB and to avoid the strong resonance of the PCB itself

In my opinion, here is an engineer trying to understand what audiophiles have been reporting for ages, and translating the results back into practical engineering, albeit unconventional.  He claims that the market will decide if his theories are correct. 

Anyway, something does seem to be working and I don't believe in magic

I definitely trust they know their craft. I guess it’s a new concept for me. Do you feel the connectors moving when you are connecting cables?

@lewm 

RB, you wrote above, "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." Can you amplify on that statement? Seems to me that frequency and time are not separable.

Yes, music comprises sound pressure levels which vary with time.  In nature, the only thing I can think of that interprets changes in these levels as frequencies is the ear canal.

Yet, historically audiophiles think in frequencies - the bass, the midrange, the treble etc.  And engineers use Fourier analysis to derive the frequency components in the original time signal.  Fourier analysis depicts sound as superimposed sine waves.which lend themselves to measurement.  Given the ability to measure, we get distortion readouts and introduce feedback to reduce the distortion in the frequency domain.  But feedback smears the time domain!  It is what SoulNote calls the Curse of the Fourier.

Take speakers for example.  If you just look at the frequency domain, you probably value a flat frequency response.  But that is much less than half the story.  Look at the speaker's response in time to an impulse, for example in a waterfall chart.  They really tell more of the story.

But look at how time stuffs up the sound from physically separate drivers, especially as it is characterised in the comb filter effect.  Even if you carefully time align the drivers to get coherent direct sound, the reflections are smeared in time and you are locked in to a small sweet spot.

That's why I like pseudo point-source speakers - your pseudo-line source speakers may perform the same coherence trick but I have not done the maths to fully convince myself.

The PRATs might have been right all along!

@audphile1 

Do you feel the connectors moving when you are connecting cables?

No more than the nervous twitches in my hands, which will get worse when holding a delicate optical cartridge worth thousands!

Seriously, I did not notice anything unusual but I only had two RCA connectors to push on.  Much prefer XLRs because of the reduced force required and the positive lock mechanism.