What innovative, unconventional cartridge designs can you recommend?

@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.

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!
 

Lol. You’re going to be fine. 

@audphile1 

So I had a wee feel last night, and the connectors feel very solid.  Maybe on the cheap (ha!) units, SoulNote do not include all their tricks.  The manual definitely mentions the 'floating' top panel.

To understand why they hypothesise (guess) that this is good, you first have to believe that vibrations affect the sound quality from at least some electronic components, and that the effect is not good!

Then it follows that the PCB these components are on should be protected as much as possible from vibrations, including from the very sound waves your system produces. So, let the PCB float on 3 pins inside a chassis that floats on 3 spikes.

Anecdotally, SoulNote noticed during product development that the lid was usually left off.  When they put the lid back on, they heard the sound quality get worse. Conclusion: More vibrational energy was reaching the PCB. Tightly coupling the lid to the chassis made for a more resonant structure than having the lid float.

My own thought experiment goes like this.  Imagine you are inside an empty steel shipping container, and somebody is hammering on the outside.  Now imagine you are in a tent being hammered.  Tent surfaces must be near the ultimate for de-coupling.

@audphile1 

Lol. You’re going to be fine

I am mindful that the shading plates attached just above the stylus are made of very thin beryllium.  In the atomic table, beryllium is the fourth lightest element after hydrogen, helium and lithium.  It is an alkaloid metal much lighter than aluminium but stiffer than mild steel and highly stable.  Of relevance to @lewm it is non-magnetic. But it is also very brittle, very very expensive, highly highly highly toxic and hard to fabricate.  Shure used if for some cantilevers in the V15 series.

I guess that's why the next element up, boron, now finds favour.