The oldest traditions in fusion, aviation, and gravity wave reasearch, built experimental devices with faint immediate hope. These devices were necessary contemplation objects toward the detail engineering of true prototypes. In this spirit I made crude devices from cheap natural crystals, mountings, high voltage sources, and commercial grade FETs. There was zero expectation of tangible results. The quick and dirty tests made with the hardware were almost purely ceremonial.
Preliminary work is underway to machine quartz cylinders from natural samples.
The resulting cylinders are to be polished to eliminate micro-flaws that as stress concentrators promote violent mechanical failure of the crystal under highly charged conditions. I do not yet know if this applies only to man-made ceramic piezo materials, or the magnitude of sensitivity loss, if any, by supercooled quartz or tourmaline. Your scheme eliminates two major sources of error, seismic and non-gaussian. Seismic is important at very low frequencies, say lower than 100 Hz. Non-gaussian is the technical name for acts of god, like a truck hitting your building, or a high energy cosmic ray hitting your detector.