What innovative, unconventional cartridge designs can you recommend?

@audphile1 

In the old days, I counted myself lucky to own a single recording of a single symphony from one composer.  Then the single expanded to the full set.  Now I have several full sets of my favourite composers, include Mahler.

As if that's not enough, I am starting to collect multiple versions of the same performance on different media.  Not bad for somebody who apparently is only interested in hardware 

FYI, the amount of capacitance "needed" to smoothe out rectified AC voltage into DC voltage is inversely proportional to the final DC voltage that is delivered to the circuit.  This is why solid state devices, which typically operate on less than 100 DCV usually contain 1000s of uF of capacitance; whereas a typical tube amp or preamp usually will incorporate 100s of uF of capacitance to smoothe 300VDC or more. At the extreme other end, my Beveridge amplifier output stage operates on +/-1600VDC and the output stage PS uses a net of about 16uF of capacitance per each phase.

If you didn't order an equaliser....perhaps you have one bought elsewhere?

It turns out that it is impossible to have too many copies of Mahler's 2nd (unless you are my wife, for whom one is too many).

@dogberry 

Yes, my DS Audio distributor offered me SoulNote Equalizers as an alternative to the DS Audio range.  I bought one of the first shipment of SoulNote E1 Ver2 into Australia, basically on specifications, reviews of other SoulNote models and his recommendation.

DS Audio lists about 18 third-party equalisers on their website - Ed Meitner makes 2 of them, and SoulNote 3.  SoulNote is much more ambitious than DS Audio, for example offering fully balanced operation for Moving Coil cartridges in the E1 Ver2.  They don't use the feedback needed to get good measurements in the frequency domain; they concentrate on getting the time domain as accurately as they can.  Works for me!

Back to Mahler .  Presto Classical lists more than 170 offerings of his sixth symphony alone!  There are incredible 150th anniversary deals - for example a 12-CD set with Sir Simon Rattle conducting all the symphonies for under A$50. Includes his towering performance of #2, for your #1.  My #1 even thanked me for playing it to her 

Rattle's #2 is my favourite of all the ones I have (ten). I'm also very fond of his version of #10 as put together by Deryck Cooke.

I bet you can't wait to get to Canberra!