I'm sorry. Are you saying the Artech Premium phono cartridge clips eliminate static charge build-up, or are you thinking that the cause of the noises is something else? Thx.
Just reading the thread, it sounds to me like the problem is indeed due to static charge. The OP has not yet revealed much about his listening room, other than the humidity. If he has a wool carpet or wears leather soles, those two are culprits in bringing charge to the LP, even if it was discharged to begin with. The new Audioquest brush that grounds its fibers via the body of the user is pretty effective at least at reducing the charge on the LP surface to the point where there are no obvious physical phenomena to deal with. The voltage potential of static charge, which easily reaches a threshold of around 3000V and can reach levels as high as 30,000V on the surface of an LP, can certainly jump across open switches, so the OP's reports to that effect do not dissuade me from the static charge hypothesis, unless I am completely misunderstanding the scenario.
Running the cartridge into 100 ohms load is very suboptimal for the Hana, in that one could expect a high frequency roll-off within the audio band due to an impedance mismatch, but this would never be so severe in slope as to eliminate the kinds of noises that I think the OP is describing (which in any case are not particularly high in frequency). And the impedance match would neither help nor hurt the tendency to accumulate static charge. Finally, the last thing I would blame in this scenario is the tonearm, as in, I cannot imagine that the tonearm has anything to do with it.
These are just my opinions based on what I read on this thread. None of us except the OP has all the facts, however.
Just a thought for Audiosaurex: You say you have been replacing all your record sleeves lately. Did you do this all at once, at a single sitting or two? If so, the very act of changing the LP sleeve, which is a major culprit in conferring a static charge to the vinyl, could have charged up several of your LPs. Once the vinyl is charged, the condition has a tendency to persist for a surprisingly long time. If you read the Shure Corporation white paper on static, you can see that their actual data on that subject. (I can't remember the numbers, off hand, but I am thinking months maybe.)
