What innovative, unconventional cartridge designs can you recommend?

@audphile1 

Unfortunately for my audio pleasure, I have been back in Sydney since Sunday so no further progress on the break in to report.  At least, I did not break it during installation.

The more I think about it, the more I am convinced that the low noise floor and muted reaction to record imperfections like tics, pops, crackles and scratches are a singular property of DS Audio cartridges.  But I am not used to LOMC.

Looking forward to hearing from @rajugsw on this.

Meanwhile from HFN-Oct-DS-Audio-Grand-Master-Extreme_Reprint-LOW.pdf

Despite my adoration of Decca, Soundsmith and Koetsu pick-ups, HFN Feb ’21 saw me write, ‘The Grand Master is so truly supreme in resolution, transparency, spatial recreation, neutrality and any other parameter I can name that it’s impossible for me to not say what I usually try to avoid: “This may be the best cartridge I’ve ever heard”’. This time, I cannot deny: the Grand Master Extreme is even better

@richardbrand 

Have you found that it sounds better after the first couple of albums?

@richardbrand as you go up in quality of LOMC cartridges the noise level drops. 
I first experienced it going from Goldring E3 MM to Hana EL. But then moving up to Hana ML was even a bigger drop in noise floor. 
The next model up the Hana Line, the Umami Blue is even quieter. I just heard it over the weekend. One other thing I noticed is the boron cantilever on the Blue is much thinner than its aluminum counterpart on ML. The stylus on the Blue is also finer than the ML’s or at least it looked that way to me (both the ML and the Blue feature microline stylus shape).

There are also other notable differences that contribute to lower noise.

I’m not sure how DS Audio does it or if it does anything special or it’s the equalizer that helps or both.
That is the next level listening experience we should be getting from the higher priced, higher quality cartridges and phono stages 

@tcutter 

Have you found that it sounds better after the first couple of albums?

That's a simple question with a complex answer, so far.

What I have found is that the stylus picks up a lot of crud when it 'sees' a record for the first time.  And probably the second time as well.  During the first few days (and that's all I have had with it) I have reverted to inspecting and usually cleaning the stylus after each side.  Mainly I use the DS Audio ST-50 gel device, but it is not very good at removing trailing whiskers.  For them, I am using an Audio Technica brush with as little fluid as I can manage.  Sometimes I can catch a whisker with my fingers 

Because the Holbo has an aluminium platter, I added a Funk Firm 3-mm Achromat vinyl mat to mitigate potential charge migration to records, and to act as a vibration sink.  At first the Achromat was quite warped and, between that and a gunked-up stylus, I could very occasionally hear some mistracking on a couple of organ records.

The Achromat is designed to be stuck to the platter with six adhesive pads, so I added them to correct the warping.  At this point, I had to go back to Sydney so further experimentation has stopped for now.

I believe the stylus shape is contacting different parts of the groove compared with my Micro-Line styli, hence picking up different crud.  I got the same phenomenon when I first switched to Micro-Line styli, which initially needed a lot of cleaning.

My initial impressions are of dramatic improvements compared with my MM set up. I do expect the sound quality to improve as the suspension runs in ...

@audphile1 

There are also other notable differences that contribute to lower noise. I’m not sure how DS Audio does it 

That's why I am looking forward to @rajugsw commenting on DS Audio vs LOMC.

When I auditioned the Holbo deck with the Kiseki blue I was struck by the high amount of quiescent noise.  So much so, I later went back to the dealer to investigate where this was coming from.  The only explanation was the high amount of gain needed with LOMC.  This was before I'd heard of DS Audio.

One way DS Audio gets very low quiescent noise is because the output requires far less gain than other cartridge types - for example 70-mV compared with 5-mV for MM and say 0.2-mV for LOMC.

Muted response to surface noise is helped by low effective tip mass, but probably of much more importance is the fact that the system responds to stylus position, not velocity.  A scratch could cause much bigger changes in velocity than position.  That's my guess, anyway