What innovative, unconventional cartridge designs can you recommend?

@rauliruegas 

I started this thread because I was genuinely looking for guidance on what to buy today to replace my vintage and my almost entry-level new MM cartridges.  I qualified the title because I did not want everybody shouting from the rooftops how great their own cartridge sounded, without giving any plausible explanation as to why.

In case you missed it, my dad gave me his Garrard 301 with SME 3009 Series 2 improved tone arm, mounted in an SME plinth.  I started to realise that these are highly valued, and wanted to find out why.  I embarked on a series of upgrades and got to roughly parity with CD sound quality, but @lewm in particular convinced me there was more quality to be had.

So I recently purchased a near reference Holbo Mk2 air bearing system with tangential tone arm.  That got me past the CD sound quality benchmark albeit with a vintage Shure cartridge fitted with a Jico SAS/B microline stylus.  The next step was a better cartridge, and Holbo had mentioned DS Audio amongst a host of other top end cartridges.  Hence this thread!

You challenged me to compare the specifications of the second from the bottom DS003 cartridge I bought against the Technics 

could you tell us if your DS Audio outperforms the cartridge FR Technics ( I named it ) specification?

One obvious area where the DS003 has better specification is channel separation, 27 dB versus 24 dB.  But both my MM cartridges are better still!

Frequency response is murkier because while Technics, and you, claim: Frequency response: 5 Hz- 120,000 Hz, this is pretty meaningless without guardrails, when it becomes 20-Hz to 15-kHz -0.3dB which is roughly what labs have reported for the DS003.

Another spectacular win for the DS003 is output of 70-mV.

Korf has some further insights, see Cartridges (my emphasis though)

There is an oft-repeated misconception that MCs sound better just because of their lower moving mass. The lowest published moving mass cartridge is a moving magnet (MM), Technics EPC-100C Mk4.

Please note we are only discussing magnetic pickup cartridges here. There are many other types, like optical, strain gauge, capacitive etc. All of them have remarkable sonic potential and can be built to a level competitive with top MCs.

I generally prefer to play the ball, not the man but your closing reamrks deserve a reply"

I wonder other than real MUSIC against which cartridges you will make comparisons with the DS Audio other than the Shure/AT mediocrity level.

Obviously that's only my opinion than several times just do not like the gentlemans in this forum.

My first 30 years of listening to classical music were either live performances or vinyl, so call me a newbie if you like. When CDs came out, I called in on Peter Walker of Quad fame, who said they were fantastic, so I switched to CDs at exactly the time I got my Garrard to Australia.  I am really not that interested in hardware, just on buying as well as possible when I can afford to.

I would prefer to rely on manufacturers' actions than reviewers' articles or blog posts. Ed Meitner was focused on SACD before DS Audio blew up his vinyl expectations.  He ranks SACD ahead of vinyl, then CD.  Apart from comparing with live music, I sometimes compare with SACD and CD versions of the same recording with vinyl.  I also go to audio shows and visit dealers.

I don't claim to have golden ears or aspire to be a reviewer, but I am happy to share my experiences to hopefully help others. On the other hand, I am a trained scientist and I believe there is a physical reason for every real change in sound quality, whether we know why or not!

Welcome back, Raul!

@richardbrand I’m a big fan of Ed Meitner’s work.

Meitner makes 2 phono preamps for DS Audio cartridges. Meitner DS-EQ2 SE features RCA outputs only (I can’t use RCA) and EMM Labs DS-EQ1 V2 has both RCA and XLR outs but is outside of my budget currently. It would also be nice if these phono preamps accommodated MM and MC cartridges as well. May be I’ll come across a used unit some day.

@audphile1 

It would also be nice if these phono preamps accommodated MM and MC cartridges as well

I was originally offered a secondhand SoulNote E2 Equalizer which does just that!  At that point I had hardly heard of SoulNote, but I was hooked. You can switch on-the-fly between all three sources, MM, MC and optical. The unit was sold just before I could order it, and a new one was outside my price range.

Then I was offered the SoulNote E1 Ver2.  The original E1 did not handle optical, but they fixed that with Ver2 which handles MM and MC in addition to optical, I got one of the first batch into Australia.  You can switch on-the-fly between optical and either MM or MC.  If you want to switch between MM and MC you have to swap cables, though.  Another quirk is that while XLR input is offered for MM and MC, the unit does not operate in balanced mode for MM.

The far more expensive E3 only handles optical!

Another quirk, caused by DS Audio's use of two standard tone arm wires to carry the power for the LEDs, is that optical cannot use a balanced input connection.

An educated guess is that DS Audio are working on how to provide power and balanced operation ...

Couldn't they run the two power lines as a separate harness entirely and therefore achieve a balanced signal path?  But I wonder whether the optical transducer per se lends itself to balanced operation. Because the signal does not arise from a coil in a magnetic field.  It might be done with two diodes per phase in a balanced pathway.