Hana umami red

Designer Hana Okada-san has combined the best elements to create a memorable and emotional musical experience.

Ebony wood, rare-earth magnets, precision-cut diamond and high-purity copper wire are finely crafted into Urushi lacquer and CNC-machined Duralumin.

Every detail is considered in the exceptional design of an MC cartridge.

Like a signature dish in a Michelin 3-star restaurant, each element and detail working in concert results in a memorable and emotional experience. The synergistic relationship between the magnet, armature and coil windings is an essential aspect of exceptional cartridge design.

Excel Sound, a company with a rich history of over 50 years, manufactures all the major parts of the Hana Umami Red.

Excel's highly skilled craftsmen skillfully hand-assemble the cartridge, ensuring an intense musical experience and reinforcing Hana's "Brilliant and Gorgeous" sound quality.

Hana is an in-house, export-only brand of a renowned cartridge manufacturer called Excel Corporation. Excel has been manufacturing phono cartridges in Japan since 1970, mainly for other brands.

In 2020, Hana launched its flagship high-end product, Umami Red, designed by Excel veteran Masao Okada.

The term Umami is an interesting choice, as it is a Japanese word describing a certain type of culinary delight that is neither sweet, sour, salty nor bitter, but rather "the essence of deliciousness". A fitting title for a cartridge designed to be a statement piece.

The Umami Red consists of a sculpted Duralumin body with an ebony inlay.

The materials impart different sonic properties, and Hana chose to combine the Duralumin body with a wood insert to balance the different properties that these materials can provide.

The cartridge uses the same microline pickup as the Hana ML, but replaces the aluminium cantilever of the ML with a solid boron cantilever.


The partially exposed voice coil generator is hand wound with 30 micron copper wire and features a samarium/cobalt magnet.

This generator system has impressive output characteristics, with an output of 0.4 mV and an internal impedance of 6 ohms, making it compatible with a wide range of phono preamplifiers.