Hana Umami Red MC Phono Cartridge
Michael Johnson—Of my meagre ten years in high-end audio, the best listening experiences I’ve ever had have been when friends or acquaintances invite me into their listening space and we get to pick recordings or albums to hear together. Whether that be a classmate and young audiophile inviting me into their Montreal apartment to listen to a modest but carefully pieced together Rega/NAD system, or stepping into the treated home listening spaces of high-end distributors, being a guest in someone’s “audio world” is a treat I always savour, much more so than sitting in front of multi-million dollar showroom systems or crammed into a sterile room at an audio show.
One of the best-curated home systems I’ve ever heard, was a vinyl-only system of a friend in Los Angeles, featuring some very impressive gear including a pair of Wilson Sabrinas, electronics by VTL and Dan D’Agostino, an AMG turntable, and a cherry red MC cartridge I had never heard before. “Is that the new high-end Hana?” I asked. “Yes, the Umami Red” he replied “the best value cart in analog.”
Of course, that’s quite a statement, especially for a cartridge priced at $3950. I had heard plenty of ultra high-end Koestsu, Benz, Dynavector, and Lyra on a number of systems over the years, but that system fronted by the Umami Red stuck with me in my aural memory. It was a listening session filled with many familiar and new records, and I recall an overwhelming musical coherence, anchored by smooth, natural sound throughout the frequency range, and a dynamic authority that never seemed forced.
In the time between then and now, I ended up with Hana’s much less expensive ML cartridge ($1200) in my system and was impressed with not only its tonal character but also the superb tracking ability of its microline stylus, a unique stylus profile that many consider being the best around. But the Umami stuck in the back of my mind, so I reached out to Garth Leerer and Ken Bowers at Musical Surroundings, the North American distributor of Hana cartridges, to see if I could get a demo unit of the in-demand Umami Red. When Ken finally had one available for me to try, he admitted to me “I’m very sad to see this one go, it’s a very special cartridge”. Of course, all distributors are very careful loaning out gear, but this almost seemed like someone watching their only child drive off to college. Needless to say, I was intrigued by any product that could inspire such protective devotion.
Fans of moving coil cartridges know Hana, even if you think you don’t, you probably do. Hana is the in-house, export-only brand of a cartridge manufacturer known as the Excel Corporation. Excel has been manufacturing phono cartridges in Japan since 1970, primarily for other brands. Some familiar names in phono cartridges currently manufactured by Excel include the likes of Etsuro Urushi and Sumiko. In 2015, Excel set out to produce its own brand and has made quite a splash with excellent, affordable moving coil designs such as the EL/H, SL/H, and ML/H series of cartridges. Each letter denotes both the stylus type (elliptical, Shibata, and microline) and either low or high output. It wasn’t until 2020 that Hana launched its high-end flagship, the Umami Red, designed by Excel veteran Masao Okada. The term Umami is an interesting choice, being a Japanese word to describe a certain type of culinary delight that is neither sweet, sour, salty, or bitter, but rather the “essence of deliciousness”. A fitting title for a cartridge designed to be a statement piece.
Construction of the Umami Red features a sculpted Duralumin body with an ebony wood inlay. As readers may know, different materials impart different sonic properties, especially when those materials house a vibrating cantilever. For example, there is an entire industry that sells attachable bodies for the cheap and cheerful Denon DL 103 to positively affect the sound. Duralumin (an aluminum alloy) is a popular choice for moving coil cartridges, as are many different species of wood, which are often known for imparting a warm and luxurious sound (Koetsu are famous for their wood-bodies carts). My theory is that by combining this Duralumin body with a wood insert, Hana has sought to balance the various properties these materials can impart.
On the mechanical side, the cartridge employs the same microline stylus found on the Hana ML but ditches the ML’s aluminum cantilever for one of solid boron. The partially exposed moving coil generator is hand-wound with 30-micron copper wire and features a Samarium/cobalt magnet. This generator system has impressive output specs, with an output of .4mV and a 6-ohm internal impedance, which makes it compatible with a wide range of phono preamplifiers.
Specifications
Body: Duralumin
Finish: Gloss Urushi Lacquer / Red
Cantilever: Boron
Stylus: Microcline Nude Diamond
Parts Material: Pure Iron
Magnet: Samarium Cobalt
Output Pins: 24K Gold Plated
Coil Impedance: 6Ω
Output: 0.4mV
Coil Wire Material: High Purity Copper
Load Impedance: >60Ω
Frequency Response: 15-50,000Hz
Output Balance: 0.5dB/1kHz
Channel Seperation: 30dB/1kHz
Tracking Force: 2g
Trackability: 70μm/2g
Dynamic Compliance: 10 x 10(-6) cm/dyne (100Hz) Estimated at 17 x 10(-6)cm/dyne at 10Hz
Weight: 10.5g
Height: 15.8mm
My Use
I set up the Umami Red ($3950) on the Acoustic Signature TA-1000 tonearm mounted on my Pure Fidelity Horizon Turntable. Alignment was accomplished with the Dr. Feickert Universal Protractor, set to Stevenson alignment, which seems to be closest to the alignment provided by Acoustic Signature’s own jig. Azimuth was double-checked using the Ortofon Test Record.
I was nervous about setting up such a high-end cartridge (my normal comfort zone so far has been carts in the 1-2k range), but the Umami proved to spare me any frustrations or nasty surprises. Kudos to Hana for including an actual functional stylus guard, which slides on the entire body of the unit. The generous output and easy-to-match recommended loading paired harmoniously with my Allnic H-1202 phono stage. I set loading at 117 ohms, which to me sounded much more balanced than my next lowest option; 69 ohms.
Listening
The Umami Red arrived already partially broken in with roughly 10 hours on the clock, but it started to reveal its true character after about 25 hours. Coming from the Hana ML, the sound I was hearing was very familiar in character. There was a smooth sound signature with a very natural and warm musicality, with a silky, extended top end that I’ve come to associate now with Excel products. The Umami immediately distinguished itself however with far more detail, a far wider soundstage, and far more instrumental separation. Bass was also a completely faster, more taught affair, it was as if my system “woke up” from 100 Hz on down.
Tracking is another thing the Umami Red does incredibly well, taking the inner grooves of the record in stride and handling the most complex and dynamic cuts without mistracking. Some famous doozies such as the sibilance of Billie Holiday’s Lady in Satin, the bass drum hits in Wilson Audio’s Winds of War and Peace, and the hammer blows of Bernstein’s recording of Mahler’s Symphony No. 6 were handled as fine as ever by this superb tracker.
A cartridge like this had me pull out some audiophile heavy hitters to see what new insights I could glean. Steely Dan’s Aja on Cisco Records, cut by Kevin Gray, is one of my prize records, and let’s be honest, it doesn’t sound bad on any system. That being said, the Umami Red provided one of the most immersive experiences I have ever had with this well-tread music. The lush keyboards and horns on the opening track “Black Cow” distinguished themselves from deep in the texture with new clarity. On the album’s title track, all the measured cymbal accents coming from Steve Gadd had richness and immediacy and rang to the top of my ceiling. Dynamic shifts were bigger than before, and Wayne Shorter’s saxophone solo coupled with Gadd’s drum fills were so explosive my jaw literally, not figuratively, dropped.
One decidedly non-audiophile record that I adore, is the often unjustly-maligned 2011 album New Album by Japanese fuzz-rockers Boris. A band known for shifting between downtempo, earth-crushing doom metal, and spastic, guitar-shredding psychedelic freakouts, New Album took fans by surprise by offering an unabashedly poppy sound laden with sugary hooks. Don’t be mistaken though, this record is thick with sound. Boris is perhaps the loudest rock band I have ever seen live and their relatively (compared to a major label) small-budget recordings do not fully capture the massive scale of their sound, but the Umami Red mounted on my Pure Fidelity table reminded me very quickly to not discount the sonics of my original Japanese Daymare Recordings pressing (DYMV-996), which sprung to life in my listening room with fat, driving bass guitar lines, and an infectious kick drum thump.
True to form, New Album is mastered relatively loud and compressed, like virtually all modern rock and metal albums. That said, the Umami pulled out oodles of texture that let me float in the lush, overdriven riffs and poppy hooks on display. On track 4, “Black Original”, I could hear all the individual layerings of bassist Ohtani Takeshi’s vocals, bringing new details into the wall of sound I was accustomed to. On side C, the track “Spoon” provided an overload of rich texture from Wata’s overdriven guitars. Despite the lack of authentic dynamics in this recording, the sound blossomed to provide a deep image and rich open midrange. This cartridge was helping me rediscover recordings I had sonically written off, and I think that’s part of its versatile charm.
The last record I played for this review was an old favourite of mine, Fritz Reiner’s 1957 Vienna Philharmonic recording of Richard Strauss’s tone poems Till Eulenspiegel's Merry Pranks” and Death and Transfiguration on RCA Living Stereo (LSC-2077). I own both an original US-shaded dog pressing of this and the Analogue Productions reissue, and both records are magical in their own right. The AP shines on bass and dynamic slam, but there’s some midrange and treble magic on the original that caused me to reach for it this time around.
Living Stereo records thrive on their string tone, and through the Hana, this was on display better than I’ve ever heard in my system. The listener is rendered both a section sound and the little details that bring out each stand and let you know there are individuals making up this whole. The soundstage and image depth was incredible here, and I got a real sense of the “walls” of the concert hall and how they interacted with the stage musicians. Percussion and cymbals in particular imaged marvellously and had a very palpable metallic texture and complex overtones.
In both tone poems, I enjoyed how the Umami placed the woodwind and brass sections in the stereo image, casting them deep in the back of the hall, but still rendering with clarity and the ability to cut through the texture. This was apparent in the opening woodwind solos of Death and Transfiguration, where each instrument enjoyed a lot of hall resonance and the phrasing and colour changes were not only apparent but vivid and lifelike. I was captivated by the Umami's upper register, which seemed to capture all the complex upper air and harmonics of these wind instruments that so often either get cut off or turned into shrill affairs. The top end of this cartridge exudes a smooth, refined concept of detail that is very inviting to the listener.
Final Thoughts
Comparing the Umami Red ($3950) to its more modest sibling, the ML, was very enlightening as both carts have a very similar sound on the surface, but once you get going you realize that Umami Red takes that smooth, even sound signature and greatly expands the focus, clarity, dynamic power, and imaging to something at a far greater level than I’ve heard in most cartridges. One of the biggest factors I enjoyed was just how much instrumental separation was accomplished while still maintaining a rich and coherent musical presentation.
I think Hana has a real winner in its flagship cartridge. It digs so much information out of the grooves and presents it in a very musical and pleasing manner, leading me to enjoy very long and engrossing listening sessions. The generous specs mean it will pair well with most phono preamps and modern tonearms, and the sound signature is a crowd-pleaser, walking a great neutral line of being smooth without sacrificing one bit of all the engaging things like texture, image, detail, or speed. It also tracks superbly, imparting very little surface noise by getting very deep into the groove when set up properly.
The Umami Red is not just the most engaging cartridge I’ve had in my system, but it’s one of the most engaging cartridges I’ve ever heard, and that includes time spent with very high-end systems and cartridges double its price. For listeners like me who have hung out in the 1-2k range of moving coil carts for many years, the Umami Red represents one of the smartest “steps up” to the high end you can make in my opinion. The sky is the limit when it comes to high-end moving coil cartridges, but I think Hana has presented a very good case here that this could be your “end game”. I decided it very well might be mine, as I arranged to purchase my demo unit and keep it permanently in my system as a long-term analog reference (my apologies to Ken for his loss). That’s the best endorsement I know how to make.
Further information: Hana Cartridges
