No cartridge is good enough.

That's what we are trying to talk about - to get beyond that.
Besides, not everyone who can pay anything uses the Soundsmith or linear tracking tonearm.

Well, since my LP rig regularly transports me to the artists' performance, place, and time, I have little urge to mess with it at present. Live performances have greater varieties of non-linearities, ambient noise, room acoustics, energy of performance, etc., and they're the real deal. Variations in state of the art vinyl playback pale in comparison.

Live performances do vary a lot but they all have one thing in common - they sound real even if they sometimes sound like crap. Hi-Fi never quite sounds real even if it sometimes sounds great. 
So..it appears that no-one tried that optical cartridge or laser turntable. Or someone did try but doesn't want to post. I better ask Japanese.

Atmasphere, there are totally different opinions, don't present what you say as a truth. Nor do I think that many would agree with you. Direct to disc is not considered the ultimate sound by everyone at all.

What I posted earlier is fact, not opinion. But there is a reason that tape has traditionally been used in the mastering process of LPs and that has to do with convenience. Recording a direct-to-disc LP is pretty hard- essentially the mastering engineer has to work with the musicians to create each track, and it all has to be right over the entire LP side, otherwise you have to record the entire side over again! Tape can be erased so is a lot easier to deal with.

Tape was originally conceived as a hifi medium by the Nazis during WW2. The first tape recorders were made by them; one of three known to exist in the world is on display at the Pavek Museum in Minneapolis  http://www.pavekmuseum.org/ 

The Pavek is a must-see for audiophiles.

Most people don't realize this but the LP has a lot of bandwidth. All modern cutting systems can put information in the groove up to 30KHz no problem- and it can be played back by nearly any magnetic cartridge- further, nearly all phono equalizers have had this sort of bandwidth going back 50 years. The LP system can go lower than tape can too- the limit being the mechanical resonance of the playback apparatus (7-12Hz). Its hard to get tape to go much below about 25Hz (tape speed being a big variable).

But quite often tape does seem to sound better than the LP. This is not because of the media, its because of how the LP is produced (how much care went into the individual mastering project) and how well (or not) that the LP is reproduced in the home. 

Well, Atmasphere, you would have to prove your 'fact'. And I look forward to receiving direct to disc records from you. I'll return them, no worries.