In the other side the " tale " about those " tick and pop " is just that a tale that can't be proved it happens.
Sure it can. I have to admit though the first time I encountered this it had me floored. That was a bit over 30 years ago. Since then I've seen it plenty of times.
There's plenty of sound engineering reason why this happens. The electrical resonance between the LOMC cartridge and the tonearm cable can be a peak of **30dB**. If the cartridge is making 0.5mV, this means that the peak could be half a volt! Many phono sections that can handle a LOMC cartridge will simply be overloaded by that much input. In solid state preamps in particular, the RFI can be rectified at the base of the very first stage of gain, resulting in a burst of noise for a very short period of time- a tick or a pop results from the circuit being overloaded.
This isn't hard to prove; we can inject a 0.5V RF signal at 1 or 2MHz into a preamp and see what happens. Often it isn't pretty. The idea that somehow this 'can't be proved it happens' is ridiculous on its face.
I've never heard the atmasphere phono product (I heard a set of their
mono amps decades ago and liked them) but note it also uses balanced
inputs. I reckon it is a fully balanced product like the Accuphase.
@ivanj It is, and has the distinction of being the first balanced line preamp made for home use back in 1989. People don't think about it as so weird now, but back then people looked at the MP-1 crosseyed because it used XLR connections for the phono input.