To be frank, optical cartridges had not been my cup of tea. IMHO they were clean, quiet and gave excellent performance in all hifi aspects.
However they couldn't "touch" my heart as much as the traditional cartridges.
I fully agree with this. I still like the DS Audio cartridges more than all but my favorite moving coil and moving iron cartridges, but I always felt there was something missing from the optical cartridges in the "musicality" department.
I had a fairly long talk with Angus about precisely this, and he basically agreed with me. But he said that his optical decoder recovers the musicality.
It will be very interesting to put this to the test as some of our people audition the WestminsterLab optical decoder.
