Головки звукоснимателя — Etsuro Urushi Bordeaux

The Etsuro Urushi Bordeaux is a hand-finished MC pickup with very low output from the Etsuro line, a series developed jointly by Masao Okada of Excel Sound and Etsuro Akiyama of Dai-Ichi Shoji. Excel Sound is a Tokyo cartridge maker with more than half a century of experience building MC designs, much of it as an OEM supplier, while Dai-Ichi Shoji of Yokohama has exported audio equipment since the 1970s. In the current range the Bordeaux sits between the diamond-cantilever Gold and the lower-priced Cobalt Blue and Gin-nezu, and the US price was quoted at USD 8,500.

Key specs that matter

Output is 0.25 mV at 1 kHz with a channel balance better than 0.5 dB, and channel separation reaches 33 dB at 1 kHz. The internal impedance is 3 ohm. Frequency response runs from 15 Hz to 50,000 Hz. The stylus is a microline diamond with an 80 micron contact radius, set in a 0.4 mm sapphire pipe cantilever. Tracking weight is 2 g and trackability is rated above 70 microns at that force. The body weighs 9.0 g and the output pins are gold plated.

Engineering and use context

The housing is machined from A7075 extra super duralumin, an aerospace grade aluminium alloy, and sits on a 2.5 mm thick sapphire base plate. Sapphire is used for both the cantilever tube and the base so that vibration passes along hard, stiff material rather than into softer parts of the body. The magnetic circuit pairs a samarium cobalt magnet with electromagnetically soft iron, and the copper coils are wound with a small number of turns, which explains the very low output and impedance. The name refers to the finish - each body is coated in traditional Japanese urushi lacquer by craftsmen of the Urushi Sakamoto Company, a multi-stage handmade process that builds up the deep red Bordeaux colour and adds stiffness to the shell. The maker suggests 30 to 50 hours of use before the cartridge settles.

Pairing

The very low output needs either an MC phono stage with plenty of gain and low noise or a step-up transformer, and Etsuro offers its own permalloy-core Transformer for that job. Starting with the phono stage load set wide open and lowering it from there is advised, and stages with minimum settings of 10 ohm and 33 ohm are workable. A tonearm of medium effective mass suits the body weight and tracking force.

Alternatives

The Etsuro Cobalt Blue keeps the microline stylus, sapphire pipe cantilever and lacquered A7075 body at a lower price.