Gramophone Dreams

At the end of Gramophone Dreams #46, I was lost in the pristine beauty of Decware's 25th Anniversary Zen Triode amplifier driving the DeVore Fidelity Orangutan O/93 speakers. That was an extremely enjoyable system, and I was hoping to keep it intact for another month. My plan was simply to morph into my long-postponed opus on tube rolling using the Zen Triode as well as Ampsandsound's Bigger Ben headphone and loudspeaker amp. Both are single-ended triode, no-feedback designs and therefore perfectly suited for tube-swapping comparisons.

Then, on December 17, at 6:37am, I was on the bed meditating, in the lotus position, when it hit me: I can't do tube rolling yet. I must first cover Hana's new flagship moving coil cartridge, the Umami Red (footnote 1), while it is still new news.

Ten minutes later, I realized that the fairest plan would be to review the fancy Hana, which is distributed in the US by Musical Surroundings, with that company's own Nova III solid state phono stage. The Nova III is not quite new news, but readers should know about it.

Then, in full, "first things first" mode, I also realized that before I do the tube-rolling experiments I must first review the Justin Weber–designed Bigger Ben amplifier. That way, I can use it as a reference, and readers will know what I'm talking about.

After having a coffee, I put my headband magnifier on and installed the Urushi-lacquered Hana Umami Red on Thomas Schick's 10.5" tonearm, which was attached to the two-motor Dr. Feickert Analogue Blackbird turntable. To get a quick feel for the Umami's character, I connected the 'table to my longest-term reference phono stage, the $3000 Parasound Halo JC 3+.

Hana Umami Red: the Fifth Flavor
I first heard the word umami years ago while buying ingredients for miso soup. The woman at Sunrise Japanese market (on Broome Street in New York City) said that in addition to miso paste, I needed Hondashi. I flinched when she told me it was bonito extract and MSG, but she insisted I use it, saying it was "the fifth flavor": not sweet, sour, salty, or bitter, but something else.

She was right about its importance. Hondashi added a hearty complexity to this simple umami broth's flavor. Remembering that made me curious why Hana chose that name for its all-out, $3950 phono cartridge.

I asked Garth Leerer at Musical Surroundings, Hana's US distributor, who named the cartridge.

"We were all brainstorming, and we wanted a name instead of just a model such as ML," he said. "Then, as I walked into my neighborhood Japanese store, which is called Umami Mart, I realized that Umami is the perfect name, as it means both a new, intense flavor and a synergy of parts creating a greater whole.

"I pitched my idea to Okada-san of Excel and Hiroshi-san of Hana-Youtek. After some initial concern that 'Umami' might be associated with the name of a Japanese burger joint (Umami Burger), they agreed to move forward with the name," Leerer told me.

For more than four decades, I've been telling anyone who'd listen, "Everything sounds like what it is made of," and "Audio design is more like cooking than engineering." Some people laugh.

Obviously, power supply design, circuit design, and the choice of active devices and their associated operating parameters are key aspects of the electrical recipe that establishes the core sound of all audio amplification. Less understood and only marginally quantified are the physical/material aspects of choosing the best parts with which to execute a design.

To understand why "everything sounds like what it is made of," it is useful to imagine audio signals as pulsing electromagnetic waves that impact every part of each audio component like a drumstick tapping a porcelain teacup, brass bell, or foam pillow. When the signal waves "hit" the transformers, resistors, capacitors, and the box they are in, everything shakes, spawning disharmonious tones that merge, at some low magnitude, with the passing audio signal (footnote 2).

The most obvious example of what I am describing is the record player. Turntables, tonearms, and cartridges are nothing if not rattling contraptions where delicate signal waves merge, willy-nilly, with rogue mechanical and electromagnetic waves. Change the platter or tonearm materials, or the cartridge cantilever material, and the sound changes with it.

A moving coil phono cartridge has only about a dozen parts, but the density, resonant nature, and functioning of each part has a relatively strong and usually predictable effect on the sound character of the finished product. That is why designing a moving coil cartridge might be considered a master chef's occupation.

I am certain the Hana-Excel people understand this much better than I do.

Hana and Excel: Since its founding by Masao Okada in 1970, Tokyo-based Excel Sound Corporation has specialized in making moving magnet and moving coil cartridges for numerous brands. Then one day about 5 years ago, Hiroshi Ishihara, currently of Hana-Youtek Ltd. of Japan, commissioned a new line of moderately priced moving coil cartridges called Hana by Excel. I reported on Hana's first creation, the $475 EL, because I liked the homespun organic flavor of its elliptical stylus, aluminum cantilever, and alnico magnets. I applauded Hana's $750 SL Mono and Stereo cartridges for using the Shibata-stylus ingredient to thicken the SL's presentation with dense detail. But...

Until now, the Hana recipe that appealed to me most was for the $1200 ML. The ML retained the EL's and SL's aluminum-pipe cantilever but installed a Microline stylus—hence the ML moniker—and exchanged the EL's/SL's plastic body for an injection-molded Delrin body topped with a brass cap fitted with threaded brass inserts for mounting without nuts. Just as the venerable Denon DL-103 moving coil benefits from exchanging its slack, "meh"-sounding plastic body for the denser, more focused sound of an aluminum body (as in Zu Audio's DL-103), so did Hana's ML benefit from a change in body material.

The recipe for Hana's new all-out Umami Red consists of a nude Microline diamond mounted on a boron cantilever with its high-purity copper coils wrapped on a square permalloy armature centered in the flux-field of an iron pole piece and a samarium cobalt magnet. This magnetic circuit is attached to the "ear-shaped" section of the gloss-red Urushi-lacquered Duralumin A7075 alloy body that features an ebony wood inlay. The cartridge weighs 10.5gm, and its coil impedance is 6 ohms/1kHz with an output of 0.4mV. Recommended load impedance is >60 ohms, and suggested VTF is 2gm. Dynamic compliance is specified as 10 × 10^-6cm/dyne at 100Hz.

Listening: The first thing I noticed with the Hana Umami Red feeding the Parasound Halo JC 3+ (at 80 ohms loading, Garth Leerer's recommendation) was the intensity with which it brought Lead Belly (Huddie Ledbetter) to life in his humanity-flexing June 1949 performance at the University of Texas, Austin (1973 LP, Playboy Records PB 119). I can only describe this intensity as a wide-angle, nonrefractive clarity that made me constantly aware of the auditorium space, the feel of the audience, and, most of all, Huddie performing with his whole heart and full battery of talents just six months before his death.

The Umami revealed Lead Belly, with microphones on his voice and guitar, facing the audience with a crisp, almost-really-there presence. The sound was so vivid, I imagined I saw musicologist-recordist Alan Lomax standing See below the stage with his Ampex. Vocal intelligibility was markedly better than with the Zu Denon DL-103 Mk.2, the Ortofon 2M Black, or the $1200 Hana ML. Through the Parasound JC 3+, the Umami MC generated a clean window with a deep, quiet view into the recording, which, amazingly, sounded like analog tape.

It is important that you fully understand the meaning of my last sentence. When a phonographic cartridge makes a pure-analog LP sound "like analog tape," it must be recovering enough low-level information to trigger that recognition in the listener. There is no higher compliment than to say a phono cartridge makes an LP sound like what its master source is made from.

I would compare the most typical differences between the sound of one audio component and another to sharpness and contrast in photography. On this Lead Belly record, the Umami Red displayed sharper, more precisely focused images than the much less expensive Hana ML. More surprisingly, the Umami's natural-feeling contrast levels, grain-free clarity, and lifelike solidity reminded me a lot of what I experience with My Sonic Lab's Ultra Eminent Ex ($6995), which also uses a lacquered Duralumin A7075 alloy body, a line-contact stylus, and a boron cantilever. Both cartridges have a similar weight, output, and compliance. And both make pure analog LPs sound like master tapes.

Musical Surroundings Nova III
I reviewed Hana's $750 SL cartridge in Gramophone Dreams #24 using Musical Surroundings' overachieving $750 Phonomena II+ phono stage (footnote 3). It seems only fair to audition this new, higher-achieving Hana with MS's higher-priced ($1500) Michael Yee–designed Nova III phono stage.

In that GD24 story, I mentioned my low regard for wall warts and how I believe switching power supplies yield no sonic benefits. Therefore, I reviewed the Phonomena II+ with MS's (optional) $650 Linear Charging Power Supply (LCPS). The MS Nova III also came with a wall wart, so once again I used the LCPS for my auditions.

But before sampling the Umami, to get a feel for the Nova III's ultimate potential, I began my auditions with my BFF reference cartridge: the $8995 Koetsu Rosewood Signature Platinum moving coil, loaded at 100 ohms.

I needed a recording that would show enough rear-stage detail, piano note reverb tails, and voluminous hall sounds to let me gauge the Nova III's impact on my beloved Koetsu. I used nothing less than the finest pure analog (all vacuum tube) recording in my collection: Saudades (LP, Water Lily Acoustics WLA-CS-16), produced by Richard Vandersteen (of Vandersteen Audio) and recorded at the First Presbyterian Church in Santa Barbara, California. Kavichandran Alexander captured the performance with microphones, mike preamps, tape heads, studio monitors, and cutting-head amplifiers designed by the late Tim de Paravicini (of EAR Yoshino), who also provided final mastering.

Listening for how lifelike Dom Um Romão's berimbau, Chico Freeman's saxophone, and Izio Gross's piano can sound is always my best test for cartridge and phono stage verity.

---

Footnote 1: Hana/Excel Sound Corporation, 3-7-37, Shin-Yoshida-Higashi, Kohoku-ku Yokohama, Kanagawa, Japan 2 23-0058. Web: hanacartridges.com

Footnote 2: My scientific side balks at this: Electric fields and currents interact with matter in very particular ways—they don't bump into (eg) capacitors as if they were teacups—and the characteristic sounds of materials are determined by resonant frequencies that are quite easy to measure if they're present. Yet, I believe that on a subjective level, Herb's insight is valid and—well—insightful.—Editor

Footnote 3: Musical Surroundings, Inc., 5662 Shattuck Ave., Oakland, CA 94609. Tel: (510) 547-5006. Web: musicalsurroundings.com