I am happy to share that both the Hana Umami Red and Hana Umami Blue MC Cartridges are featured in the latest Positive Feedback Writers’ Choice Awards 2023.
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“The newest addition to the Hana Umami line-up of excellent cartridges, the Blue is a medium low output MC design with many of the hand built features of the more expensive Red. I have not heard the Red and compared the Blue in a Helius Omega Arm to my best reference cartridges. The Red held its own and more at its friendly $2500 price.
I am very impressed by this high value design with its trickle down technology and gorgeous performance. It tracks anything and produces gorgeous full-bodied sound. The Blue, my favorite color by the way, is fully integrated from top to bottom with prodigious dynamic range. Yielding some image texture and color to my $12,000 Grado Epoch, it is musically satisfying and offers plenty of definition to please even jaded audiophiles. I played it for my friends and they could not believe this cartridge performs at this high level for the price. The Blue very well may be the sweetheart of the Hana line. The Hana Umami Blue clearly earns my Reviewers Choice Award for a superb phono cartridge design at such an attractive price!” – Robert H. Levi
“I would suggest that it is because this superb MC cartridge is manufactured by the same artisans and craftsmen of Excel Sound in Yokohama, Japan, and employs an Orbray cantilever assembly, as are the exceptional world-class Etsuro•Umami products, which contributes directly to its overachieving qualities.
Its bass performance is exceptionally well-extended and pitch-defined, capable of exposing remarkably detailed texture and delivering a degree of resolution that is both very compelling and utterly unexpected at this price. The midrange bandwidth is practically blustering with life, offering fertile detail and saturated with authentic textures, harmonic bloom, and a purity of tone that is disarming. Its remarkable resolution extends well into the upper registers, which are extremely well extended and capable of revealing delicate detail, conferring an articulate and lively sense of shimmer and air.
Globally speaking, this is a simply superb cartridge, one that consistently performs well above other entrants in its price class. While it may lean a tad to the warmer, smoother side of absolute neutrality, its broadband resolution, nuanced microdynamic expressiveness, macrodynamic control and scaling, inspiring neutrality of timbre, and overall octave-to-octave balance make it not only an exceptional value at its asking price of $3950, but render it a best buy in today’s moving coil cartridge universe.” – Greg Weaver
