Tracking Matters Most

To explain this ''conditional theory'' in our case one can also
state that ''more conditions'' then just one need to be satisfy
in order to get an good sounding cart. Body material , damping,
coils, generator, cantilever , stylus, etc. In ''holistic approach'' all
parts are important. 

No, I did not mention his appearance. I would never do that. I mentioned the appearance of his office which I saw in one of his Video's. I also saw the rest of his plant and you are right the manufacturing area is 3 orders of magnitude more organized than his office. But, Peter is the boss and he has to set an example for the rest of his staff. Not only this but it is said he manufactures his top cartridges himself. I can not say anything about his work as I have never had one of his cartridges or any work done by him. I never re tip cartridges. I throw them away once they are cooked. (which is not very often I might add) I truly dislike deceptive marketing and generally avoid buying products whose companies are guilty of this.   

mijostyn

I can only half warm up to Mr Ledermann. I like a lot of his arguments but his office is a pig sty which makes me very suspicious of the quality of his work ... In the end none of his marketing has moved me to try one of his cartridges.

Appearances can be deceiving. I’ve been to Soundsmith and have seen the facility (including where they make phono cartridges, which is really "next door" to the rest of his business) and Peter and his team have done work for me. More than once. Their work is first class and his products - even if they might not be my style - sound fantastic. His background and experience is deep and varied, so while you’re free to be "suspicious," you might want to assess him on something other than your emotional reaction to his appearance. You're only cheating yourself when you judge people that way.

Reasons versus causes. Reasons are products of our brain 
expressed  in language. Causes are natural process expressed
by physical laws. The best way to explain the difference is 
by quantification theory in combo with Tarski's theory of truth
by ''satisfaction'': all x sats Fg& Gx is true if there is no contra
example. That is to say that if one x does not satisfy the conditions
F&G then the whole  statement is not true.
There is no sense in question ''what reasons had the earthquake
to destroy the city?''
By stating that the ''moving mass'' is the most important part by
an MC cart one assumes ''causal connection''. Well i own Yamaha
MC-1S with the lowest moving mass of all my MC carts but can't
get rid of the thing for $500. To put this otherwise I prefer all other
carts above this Yamaha. In the sense of above ''general sentence''
about ''all x'' this Yamaha does not satisfy F&G. Consequently the
generalisation is not true. 

He pretty much pushed Peter Ledermann's rhetoric about mass and stylus "jitter." It is hard to argue with mass as it applies to moving systems but I can only half warm up to Mr Ledermann. I like a lot of his arguments but his office is a pig sty which makes me very suspicious of the quality of his work and he does things such as his slide comparing the size (mass) of a moving coil assembly to his moving iron assembly. In his video he states that the moving coil assembly "is the lightest one made." Maybe 40 years ago. It is a huge thing pulled out of some cheap old cartridge. He does not have to do stuff like that to make his point. In the end none of his marketing has moved me to try one of his cartridges.     

millercarbon

... Usually people who aren't engineers and therefore don't know what they're talking about tell us ...

Whoa, that's quite a logical fallacy there! Not all engineers "know what they are talking about." Not all those who are not engineers fail to "know what they are talking about."

Pretty standard fare. The one comment that stands out to me comes at 13 minutes when he says that groove noise is not cleanliness but "majorly" comes down to stylus jitter, which in turn comes down to vibration control in the moving mass of the system. As he points out, even tracking a blank silent groove is going to put the stylus/cantilever into resonance, and the signal this generates is your groove noise.

In other words he just explained something a lot of us have noticed, that groove noise and surface noise in general seems to be a lot less of a problem with the very best cartridges. I sure have noticed this tendency from Stanton to Benz to my current Koetsu, that record noise seemed to matter less and less as they got better and better. Usually people who aren't engineers and therefore don't know what they're talking about tell us stylus profile is the reason. Which never made any sense to me at all. This however makes total sense. Smart kid.