With its special Japanese character and meaning, “華”, Hana brand moving coil cartridges manufactured by Excel Sound deliver the most “Brilliant and Gorgeous” performance for vinyl music lovers and audiophiles. This HANA sound comes from superb design, engineering excellence, and decades of experience by Masao Okada, the Excel Sound cartridge design Master and his team.
For over 50 years, Excel Sound and Okada-san have manufactured many famous phono cartridges for numerous respected audio companies around the world. Their own HANA brand, introduced in 2016, has achieved global recognition for world-class analog music reproduction and incredible value.
Excel Sound designs and manufactures all the major parts, producing affordable cartridges with an excellent sound quality. Specialized tooling improves the price/quality ratio, with manufactured parts designed for maximum performance and consistency. Excel’s experienced craftsmen skillfully hand assemble all the parts into an excellent finished product, producing the consistently “Brilliant and Gorgeous” HANA sound.
HANA features multiple series of moving coil phono cartridges including the Elliptical “E”, Shibata “S”, and MicroLine “M” models, all hand-made in Yokohama, Japan.
The “Brilliant and Gorgeous” Hana sound comes from superb design, engineering excellence and 40 years of hand assembling knowhow, continuously improved in-house from 1970 by the Excel Sound Cartridge Master – Masao Okada-san, who began researching phono cartridge design in 1964 and who’s skills and expertise has been transferred to the artisans employed by Excel Sound who build the Hana cartridges.
Specialized tooling is another weapon that improves the price/quality performance, so manufactured parts are consistently perfect, repeatable parts for production, parts designed for maximum performance assuring the highest level of performance.
Lastly, perhaps the most essential ‘secret’ is the hand assembling by skilled artisans. Excel Sound craftsmen hand assemble all the parts into a perfect finished product, producing a consistent “Brilliant and Gorgeous” Hana sound. Without this precise hand assembling and the fine-tuning work by Excel Sound’s renown craftsmen, with their accumulation of 50 years of cartridge production expertise, the Hana products would not sound so consistently fine and delicate. Rare or exotic materials and extreme design is not enough to make a fine MC cartridge, but might make an expensive one.
Whilst phono cartridges are made of relatively delicate parts, they are carefully assembled, and laboratory tested by skilled craftsmen at the factory to ensure a very low defect ratio, resulting in few returns under warranty to the manufacturer. This saves Hana Distributors and Dealers a lot from awkward office work returning cartridges to the factory! In the unlikely event of a cartridge failure within the warranty period, your Dealer will replace it with a new one (final decision for warranty is made by Excel Sound, after inspection of returned Hana in its laboratory).
Of course, cartridges are in general the most fragile part of any vinyl record hi-fi replay system, they can get accidentally damaged when in use and will certainly eventually wear out, even when treated with care and respect. So, whether worn out or damaged during its life, your Hana cartridge Dealer will offer you a beneficial ‘new for old’ price, under-written by Excel Sound.
The Hana “Brilliant and Gorgeous” sound is now universally available to all music lovers, without an extreme financial burden on your equipment budget. Indeed, a Hana purchase allows you to buy more favorite vinyl records – which is the real reason for buying a good phono cartridge in the first place!
