Brilliant Corners

This undoubtedly neat effect was something I partly expected. What I didn't expect is the hair-raising dynamic expression the Miyajima coaxed from familiar recordings, which betters that of every other cartridge I've heard. On "I'm a Fool to Care" from a 1955 pressing of Les Paul and Mary Ford's The Hit Makers! (Capitol T-416), Ford's reverb-drenched voice and the chords from Paul's electric solid-body guitar leapt from the full-range Klipsch horns with a life force and snap that I hadn't previously experienced.

Even more memorable was the track's world-beating presence: The reverb trails of Paul's solid-body guitar were so palpable as to be downright spooky. Listening to this classic mono recording with a mono cartridge cleared away layers of sonic fussiness that I hear with stereo cartridges and cut to the very bone of the music. My friend Stephen Mejias once called this kind of sound "bloody," and I was hearing some of the bloodiest notes to ever emerge from my hi-fi.

Of course, from a technical perspective, what I was hearing makes sense: a mono cartridge dispenses with more than vertical motion. It also ignores crosstalk, phase anomalies, the need for antiskating, tracking errors, and other forms of noise and distortion that affect stereo cartridges. Their absence contributes to the Miyajima's remarkable way of making instruments, voices, and all manner of ambient information sound so vividly, richly, physically embodied.

But the thing about the Zero Mono that really threw me for a loop was scale. Remember the hole-in-a-wall metaphor? Well, the sonic emanations between my speakers didn't sound like miniaturized instruments coming from a single blob in space. When called for, the scale of the music was scary big. On "I'm a Fool to Care," Mary Ford's voice, floating between and above the La Scalas, sounded enormous, and the first notes of Paul's amplified guitar energized the room in a way that felt epic. This wasn't the gossamer visual space of a good stereo cartridge but rather the stark impression of a sonic event's magnitude, impact, and force, elements that felt more musically meaningful. Though for what it's worth, some sounds clearly appeared to be located in front of or behind others, a recording artifact accomplished by capturing reverberation.

Played back with the Zero Mono, single-channel records I've been listening to for 25 years simply sounded more natural, less processed, bigger, louder, richer, and more present than before. Much of this brilliant sound was a result of listening to mono records with a mono cartridge, which I confirmed by listening to them again with the Ortofon Cadenza Mono. But these qualities were heightened by the distinctive talents of the Miyajima: the fabulously saturated tone colors that are something of a signature of that company's cartridges, as well as a textural density that worked particularly well with simply recorded acoustic music.

What didn't I love about the Zero Mono's sound? Well, honestly, not much, though compared to the best stereo cartridges I've heard, the lower treble range could be a bit unruly, so that very occasionally the sound of indifferently recorded saxophones, trumpets, and violins took on an unpleasant edge.

In case it isn't clear by now, I loved listening to the Miyajima. It sounds terrific and engaged nearly all my musical and sonic pleasure meridians. That should have been enough. It was enough. But, as it turned out, there was more to hear.

The genuinely eye-opening insight came while I listened to "Intuition" from an EP by Lennie Tristano called Classics in Jazz (Capitol EAP 1-491). Issued in 1954, the hugely influential session it captured was recorded on tape in 1949. I've listened to this sweet, noisy little 7" for years, largely because two of its tracks, "Intuition" and "Digression," are the first recorded examples of freely improvised jazz, played without pre-existing parameters of time, melody, or tonality, issued nearly a decade before Ornette Coleman's first records. "Digression" sounds a bit like Satie. Blind since birth, Tristano was also arguably the first musician to graft the sounds and methods of avant-garde classical music into jazz, a process carried on by Jimmy Giuffre, Charles Mingus, Eric Dolphy, and others.

Sonically, the Tristano disk comes across as, well, historical. The mix is foggy, buried in the murk of the early tape-recording era, and its pleasures are mainly musical rather than illusionistic. Yet, listening to the first few notes of "Intuition" reproduced by the Zero Mono confounded me. The session—particularly the sound of Lee Konitz's and Warne Marsh's saxophones and Tristano's piano—now sounded like it was recorded during a later decade. Vivid, life-sized, and timbrally accurate, these instruments popped out of the mix in a way that brought to mind the admittedly hoary term "high-fidelity."

Was this a fluke? Digging through my shelves for more historical-sounding sessions, I settled on "Cariñoso" from Laurindo Almeida Quartet Featuring Bud Shank (Pacific Jazz PJ-1204), a track recorded in 1953. This collaboration between the Stan Kenton big band saxophonist and flautist and the Brazilian guitarist and arranger predates the better-known Stan Getz bossa nova records and the craze they unleashed in the early 1960s. During previous listening sessions, the lovely, low-key music on this record sounded wooly and indistinct. Yet again, the Miyajima managed to bring it to three-dimensional life, making it more bracing and realistic than I imagined possible.

Curious to find out whether the Zero Mono's knack for reanimating vintage recordings would hold up with music from the shellac era, I cued up one of those immortal recordings that should be sealed in a capsule and launched into the black expanses of space: Django Anthologie Vol. 5 (La Voix De Son Maître HTX 40271) by Django Reinhardt et Le Quintette du Hot Club de France. Recorded between 1934 and 1936, these sessions contain some of Reinhardt's most mesmerizing playing, a star turn by a young Coleman Hawkins, and suave, cheeky vocals by Freddy Taylor, the singer and dancer who got his start earlier in that decade at Harlem's Cotton Club.

No, the Miyajima didn't turn Reinhardt into Angus Young, but it made "I Can't Give You Anything but Love" as forceful, textured, detailed, life-sized, and quiet as I've heard it, and clothed the sometimes spectral sound of the band with flesh, bone, and color. In practical terms, the Miyajima was proving to be a game changer: Suddenly, hundreds of musically indispensable records made prior to the hi-fi era that—let's be honest—aren't always fun to listen to were imbued with the potential for realistic and genuinely enjoyable sound.

Let's have a 45 party!
Which brings me to the last thing I'd like to say about the Miyajima Zero Mono, which is worth pausing over: It is the single most fun cartridge I've lived with, if for no other reason that it is better than any I've heard at playing 45s. For me, these records are the MDMA of the vinyl world: Nothing sounds more beguiling than a good rockabilly or soul 45, a conviction I share with my colleague Herb Reichert. Speaking broadly, audiophiles enjoy being at home more than most people, and it can be hard to entice Herb from the comforts of his small but well-stocked Bed-Stuy lair. So when I called him, I spoke words I knew might do it: "Let's have a 45 party!"

Herb arrived a few days later with a splendid gift: a clean 45 of Frankie Ford's "Sea Cruise" on Jackson, Mississippi's, Ace Records. It was pressed in 1958 and still had a juke box number attached to the label. For most of that evening, we played one 45 after the next, making amazed faces at each other and hollering like a pair of 12-year-olds. We played "Tumbling Tumbleweeds" by the Sons of the Pioneers on green vinyl (RCA 48-0005), the glorious version of "Muleskinner Blues" by the Fendermen (Soma 1137), Gladys Knight's "Got Myself a Good Man" (Soul S-35063), Hank Snow's "The Gal Who Invented Kissin'" (RCA 47-5034), and many more. The wheels really came off when we pulled out an 11-LP Hank Williams set pressed on virgin vinyl in Japan (The Immortal Hank Williams, MGM Records MM 9097/9106) and played "Honky Tonkin'," basking in Hank's nasal whine supersized by the big-toned Miyajima.

The fun we were having listening to mono got a little out of hand, as did this column. So let me gather myself and attempt a conclusion. The Miyajima Zero Mono does everything a mono cartridge should, in sparkling fidelity, and adds its own rich, corporeal, tonally saturated voice. Yes, it plays mono reissues more compellingly than any stereo cartridge I've heard, but really comes into its own with older recordings, celebrating them and sometimes sonically reviving them in Lazarus-like fashion.

What the Zero Mono does most brilliantly is strip away the glossy hi-fi sheen that characterizes the sound of so many high-end components and reveal the music's sinew and bone. For $2250, it will mainline the excitement of your records directly into your heart, brain, and ass more effectively than the most exotic stereo moving coil. And it proves that the sonic and musical spectacle created by a great mono cartridge is every bit as compelling as the two-channel version, and possibly a little more human. If I had a turntable with a provision for a second tonearm, I'd buy it without a second thought.