HANA Umami Black Moving Coil Cartridge

The HANA Umami Black is the flagship of the Hana cartridge brand, the cap of Hana's five-tier moving-coil line. Master designer Masao Okada-san and Excel Sound built it around a diamond cantilever (a category first for Hana), the new "OKD" high-efficiency moving coil generator with integrated pole piece and rear yoke, an inverted U-shaped front yoke, a rare-earth neodymium magnet, and a 2mm square hybrid carbon-permalloy armature. Output is 0.3mV at 5-ohm coil impedance with a recommended load of 50 ohms or greater. The Black is not a Red painted black; it is a redesigned generator and a different cantilever material.

Key Features of HANA Umami Black Phono Cartridge

• Diamond cantilever (Hana category first): diamond is the hardest known material and has the highest specific stiffness available in any cantilever construction. The first cantilever resonance is pushed further above the audible band than boron achieves, and moving mass at the stylus end is the lowest in the Hana lineup.
• Microline nude diamond stylus: the same line-contact profile Hana uses on the Umami Red and Blue, mounted as a single-piece nude diamond on the diamond cantilever. Approximately 2.5-micron contact radius, long vertical contact patch.
• "OKD" moving coil generator: Hana's new generator architecture, with the world's first integrated pole piece and rear yoke and an inverted U-shaped front yoke. Optimizes magnetic energy transfer from the diamond cantilever to the coil.
• Inverted U front yoke: the U-shaped (bifurcated) inverted front yoke is engineered to control mechanical resonance, align the magnetic field, and provide precise structural support for the diamond cantilever.
• Neodymium-iron-boron rare-earth magnet: NdFeB has the highest magnetic energy density of any commercial permanent magnet, significantly higher than the Samarium Cobalt in the Umami Red and the Alnico in the Umami Blue. Higher field strength enables shorter coil windings and faster transient response.
• Hybrid carbon armature: 2mm square plate, 78% carbon-infused nickel-iron permalloy. Hand-wound on Excel's proprietary machinery with 30-micron 4N high-purity copper wire. Output is 0.3mV at 5-ohm coil impedance.
• Cryogenic treatment of generator parts: the OKD generator (integrated pole piece and rear yoke, inverted U front yoke) and the gold-plated output pins are cryogenically treated to refine grain structure in the metal and reduce internal stresses left over from machining.
• Duralumin Auricle body, special Urushi enameled finish: A7075 Duralumin CNC-machined from solid billet, finished in black Urushi lacquer applied via a specialized thermosetting process that bonds the lacquer to the aluminum substrate via vapor deposition.
• 0.3mV output, 5-ohm impedance, 11.3g weight: high-mass cartridge that wants a high-mass tonearm. Compatible with quality MC phono stages (voltage or current-amplification) running 64dB or more of gain.

Why a Diamond Cantilever

Diamond is the hardest known material and has the highest specific stiffness (stiffness divided by density) available in any cantilever construction. Boron is the closest material to diamond on this metric, and Hana uses boron in the Umami Red and Blue. The step from boron to diamond pushes the first cantilever resonance further above the audible band, lowers moving mass at the stylus end of the system, and sharpens the leading edge of every transient. In a moving coil cartridge, the cantilever is what couples the groove modulation to the coil-and-magnet generator. Anything the cantilever rounds off, smears, or low-pass filters, the generator never gets to convert into electrical signal. A diamond cantilever rounds off less and smears less than any other material Hana has used. The cost of building one is the reason the Umami Black exists as a separate flagship rather than a Red revision: machining diamond rod into a cantilever and bonding it to a Microline diamond stylus requires manufacturing tolerances and yields that scale poorly to high volume.

The OKD Generator: Integrated Pole Piece and Inverted U Front Yoke

The "OKD" generator is the second category-first innovation in the Umami Black. Conventional MC generators use separate pole pieces and rear yoke assemblies; the OKD architecture integrates the pole piece and rear yoke into a single component, which removes a magnetic-circuit interface that would otherwise introduce a small flux loss. The front yoke is inverted and U-shaped (bifurcated). The U geometry controls mechanical resonance in the generator structure and aligns the magnetic field with the cantilever pivot, while also providing precise structural support for the diamond cantilever's mounting. The armature is a 2mm square plate of permalloy (78% carbon-infused nickel-iron), hand-wound on Excel's proprietary winding machinery with 30-micron 4N high-purity copper wire. The result is a generator that delivers higher energy conversion per coil turn than the Samarium Cobalt generator in the Umami Red, which is why the Black holds 0.3mV output despite the shorter, lighter coil windings the OKD topology enables.

Neodymium Rare-Earth Magnet

The magnet is rare-earth neodymium-iron-boron (NdFeB). NdFeB has the highest magnetic energy density of any commercial permanent magnet, on the order of 50% higher than the Samarium Cobalt in the Umami Red and several times higher than the Alnico in the Umami Blue. Higher field strength at the coil gap means more electrical output per unit of cantilever motion, which is why Hana could reduce coil mass and inductance without sacrificing output. Lower coil mass and inductance translate to faster transient response, lower self-resonance, and a more linear high-frequency envelope.

Cryogenic Treatment of the OKD Generator

The OKD generator components (integrated pole piece and rear yoke, inverted U front yoke) and the gold-plated output pins are cryogenically treated. Cryogenic treatment is a slow controlled cool-down to roughly minus 300F followed by a slow return to room temperature. The process refines grain boundaries in the metal, reduces internal stresses left over from machining, and (in audio applications) is associated with lower noise floor and better signal coherence. Hana applies it to the parts of the Black that carry magnetic flux and the parts that carry the signal itself.

Duralumin Auricle Body with Black Urushi Lacquer

The Auricle body is unique to the Umami line. CNC-machined from a single billet of A7075 Duralumin, the body geometry is shaped for both internal damping and rigid mechanical coupling between the cantilever pivot and the headshell. The Umami Black body adds a black zirconia inlay on the facia for additional damping and visual contrast. The finish is a multi-stage Urushi lacquer treatment in the traditional Makie style: a black Urushi undercoat, silver-powder infusion, gold-powder "hana" name detailing, and final polishing. The lacquer is bonded to the aluminum substrate via a specialized thermosetting process at 120 C through vapor deposition, which produces a finish that is essentially indestructible at normal handling temperatures and damps body-borne resonance more aggressively than the gloss Urushi on the Red. Cartridge weight is 11.3 grams, the heaviest in the Hana lineup, which couples positively to high-mass tonearms in the 12 to 18 gram effective-mass range.

Tonearm Matching

Effective compliance is 10 x 10-6 cm/dyne at 100Hz (estimated 17 x 10-6 at 10Hz), recommended tracking force is 2.0 grams, and cartridge weight is 11.3 grams. The Black wants the highest-mass, highest-grade tonearms in our inventory. We recommend the Dynavector DV-507 MK2 ($7,250) for its rigid bi-axial pivot bearing and dynamic stabilizer (which dampens cartridge-tonearm low-frequency resonance), and the Rega RB-Titanium ($6,995) for its single-piece machined-titanium structure and high effective mass. Both tonearms have the resolution headroom and bearing precision to give the Black's transient information somewhere to land. Anything below this tier in tonearm choice will become the limiting factor in the system, and the Black will reveal it.

Phono Stage Compatibility

The 0.3mV output and 5-ohm coil impedance want a moving-coil phono stage with at least 64dB of gain (the Black is 2dB lower output than the Red, which adds up to roughly 4dB of additional gain demand at the phono stage), or an MM stage paired with a 1:15 to 1:30 step-up transformer. The 5-ohm coil also pairs naturally with current-amplification (transimpedance) MC inputs, which Hana specifically calls out as compatible alongside conventional voltage MC stages. The matches we recommend from our lineup are the Michell Apollo ($4,999), the Audia Flight FL Phono ($6,999), and the Kora ($7,999). Recommended load is 50 ohms or greater; 100 ohms is a conservative starting point and 470 ohms is a common landing spot after experimentation. Phono-stage matching at the Black's resolution level will be audible in ways it would not be at lower tiers; we encourage buyers to bring the cartridge to our showroom for an A/B against multiple stages before committing to a pairing.

Hand-Assembled by Excel Sound

The Umami Black is hand-built in Japan by Excel Sound's craftsmen, with over 50 years of cartridge-manufacturing history behind the assembly. Hand assembly matters specifically because of how tight Hana's specs are at this tier (0.5dB output balance, 30dB channel separation): those numbers require coil winding and magnet alignment tolerances that machine assembly cannot deliver consistently, and they matter more on a diamond-cantilever, neodymium-generator cartridge than on any cartridge below it in the line.

Explore the HANA Cartridge Lineup

The Umami Black is the cap to the Hana brand. The previous flagship sits one step down:

• HANA Umami Red: $3,950. Boron cantilever (versus diamond on the Black), Samarium Cobalt magnet generator with conventional pole piece and yoke topology (versus the OKD generator with integrated pole piece on the Black). Hana's flagship from 2020 to 2025 and still the brand's value reference at the statement tier. The Red and Black share the Microline nude diamond stylus, the Duralumin Auricle body, and the Urushi finish (in red and black respectively).

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HANA Umami Black Phono Cartridge Specifications