Now that I'm old, I spend a lot of time reading the morning newspaper and clucking about other people's shortcomings. Marcia Clark's prosecutorial incompetence, NASA's reluctance to fire engineers who can't convert inches to millimeters, and Madeline Albright's inability to choose a skirt length that's appropriate for her body type (which I believe is referred to in fashion circles as "dreadnought") have all fallen prey to my withering sarcasm. Cluck,cluck, cluck: They are so dumb and I'm so smart.
     Then Karma rears its head and I'm pulled up short---and lucky for me I write about record players for a living and not airplanes, home dialysis units, or something really important like surround-sound recorders: My first sample of the Miyabi/47 didn't survive its first day in upstate New York. When the box arrived I opened it, picked up a screwdriver so I could loosen the screws that held the cartridge in place, and ka-bang: The magnet pulled the screwdriver from my wimpy grasp, taking out the cantilever in the process. I'd be surprised if the FedEx man had gone ten blocks. Cluck, cluck, cluck.
      Well, there's one thing we know already: The Miyabi/47 has a powerful-ass magnet. In fact it has a powerful-ass Alnico magnet. treat it with respect and approach it with caution and a steady grip.
      Here's everything else I have learned since then...
      This product is a special collaboration between Haruo Takeda, who is the artisan behind the Miyabi cartridge line, and Junji Kimura, who is the president of 47 Laboratory. Mr. Kimura wanted a phono cartridge to compliment his own audio designs---in particular his phono preamplifier, the Model 4712 Phonocube. Not to get too far off the track so early in the game, but the 47 Laboratory Phonocube is special inasmuch as it does not present a significant resistive load to a phono signal: Its input impedance is 0 ohms. Lacking in the resistance required for a circuit to act as a voltage amplifier, the Phonocube instead behave as a current amplifier.
      Is that good? I think it might be. Phono cartridges are excellent current sources, but most audio preamplifiers would like you to give them voltage instead. You can convert current to voltage with an preamplifier or a transformer, but you cannot convert energy without wasting some of it. The Phonocube doesn't ask you to convert a thing: It simply amplifies the current already flowing in your cartridges own little circuit, presumably with less waste than it's accustomed to. Less information loss, too.
      So you want to preserve as much current as you can. And Ohm's law says that that's best done with a current source of decidedly low impedance. (Voltage divided by impedance yields current, so at the cartridge, the lower the impedance, the higher the current.)
      Can you guess what that darn Miyabi/47 has? Pretty darn low impedance. As in 2 ohms---which is less than half of most other cartridges, so far as I know.
      The Miyabi/47 has a few other things going for it. For one thing, it's one of the very few moving-coil cartridges left on the market that uses an aluminum alloy cantilever (as opposed to boron or something like that). It has good ol' fashioned copper coils, too. And its stylus profile is the tried and true "line contact" elliptical.
      Counter to the usual practice with very expensive cartridges, the body of the Miyabi/47 is not machined from aluminum alloy, nor is it carved from wood, semi-precious stone, or the relic of a minor Saint. (perhaps some day there'll be a limited edition Cardas Metatarsus.) The Miyabi/47 is molded out of some kind of plastic. In another break from tradition, its mounting holes are neither threaded nor even totally enclosed. I found, however, that these particular unenclosed holes are better than those of, say, the Dennon 103 at keeping the mounting bolts at least moderately straight and tight.
      Really, the Miyabi/47 looks pretty hohum: Black body, green Fabric covering for the generator housing, and a stick-on name plate instead of the usual silk-screened Miyabi logo. You might wonder where your $3990 has gone to.
      You won't wonder any such thing after giving it a listen---or at least after living with it for a month or two.
      Changing over to the Miyabi/47 was more like changing records than hi-fi hardware: This cartridge has strong ideas about how music should be played, not just how it should sound. Take, for instance, the opening piece on the Philip Glass collection Glassworks. My Lyra Clavis gives musical prominence to the pianist's right hand; the Miyabi is the only cartridge I've ever heard that focuses much more on what's happening in the left hand: the steady, hypnotic, metronomic three-note figure underneath the double-time notes that form the "melody" and cords. Yet by the next piece ("Floe"), the emphasis returns to those instruments that are higher up in the frequency range---the piccolos and soprano saxes. Again, it's not so much a function of sound---of emphasizing the "bass-y" or the "bright"---as it is a sense of musical focus, of finding the line that defines the piece. Most hi-fi components don't get past making sound into the making of music; this thing goes beyond playing music: It plays it on its own terms. It practically conducts.

      On the Colin Davis recording of Purcell's Dido and Aeneas, the Miyabi/47 decides---rightly, I think---that the singers are more important than the orchestral accompaniment. Vocal melodies seem more prominent are much easier to follow with Miyabi. Not only the notes but the characteristic sounds of the "lead" voices and instruments get a shot in the arm: Helen Donath's Belinda, for instance, comes to glorious, chesty life between my speakers (a little left of center, actually), while John Constable's continuo keeps machine-like tone, albeit with rich, complex, and decidedly non-machine-like tone.
      If the Miyabi's musical strong suit is its ability to find and follow a piece's essential musical line, it's greatest sonic strength is its sheer life and vibrancy, on music of every kind. At its best, this produces a great sense of immediacy and, ultimately, musical excitement. But the other side of the coin is that records which are very up-front (owing to musical style, recording/mastering techniques, or both) might be too intense for some listeners. Joni Mitchell's Blue, The Jayhawk's Hollywood Town hall, and Martin Newell's masterpiece The Greatest Living Englishman---the latter an admittedly soft, dull, and muddy recording---are all served beautifully well by the Miyabi. But discs that are little too hot to begin with (The Replacements' Pleased to Meet Me, George Jones' Greatest Hits on Mercury...you name it) can be a little much. A system that's already extremely lively or forward would not show this cartridge at its best, I think, unless that sort of thing is what you are into.
      Incidentally, using the Miyabi with my Audio Note step-up transformer instead of the 47 Laboratory Phonocube results in a less forward sound, but with slightly less detail and vibrancy. The two were obviously meant to work together---and so I should also warn you that the Phonocube takes an unusually long time to break in, and tends to sound a little too "crisp" for the first month or so of its life.
      The Miyabi/47 is darn good at minimizing surface noise, if not quite up to Lyra's standard in this regard. My average-condition Bruno Walter Beethoven Symphony No. 9 was easy to enjoy with this cartridge, and the Miyabi did a good though not superative job of calming my noisy Karl Bohm Bruckner Symphony No. 3, making for a less edgy listening experience and---again---concentrating on the flow of the notes. It also sounds dramatic and big, and it doesn't strain under the weight of the latter's loudest chords. "A great Bruckner cartridge", as my notes say.
      Some setup notes: I have used the Miyabi/47 in three different tonearms now: a Naim Aro, a Rega RB900, and an RS Laboratory RS-A1. The Miyabi liked all of them. It even liked the Naim Aro's fixed mounting holes: According to my Dennessen Sountractor alignment gauge, the stylus of a Miyabi/47 mounted in an Aro lands right about where you'd want it to land. (For a long and chafingly tedious discussion of all things overhang, don't miss my review of the RS tonearm on page 84)
      All right: I have now danced, pranced, skipped, gamboled, and sashayed around what may be the biggest issue of all, and that is the issue of price. At $3990, the Miyabi is only $1610 less than the sum I just paid for my car---a 1993 Saab 900 with ABS brakes, a leather interior, and an electric sunroof. That's very expensive for a cartridge. And unlike other very expensive phono cartridges, Mr. Takeda has not---in this instance, at least---clothed his latest cartridge in the sort of exotic trappings which buyers seem to expect at this level. Some will be disinclined to spend onyx dollars on a plastic cartridge; others will see this as an ultimate act of honesty---of spitting in the face of "high-end" pretensions.
      So forget all of that for a moment, and worry about the music. For most listeners, there are "better" recommendations. At just over $300, Dynavector's DV-10x4 is a steal, and it works well with every player in which we've tried it. For someone whose stocks took off this year or whose expecting a big bonus (one of those NASA engineers, perhaps?), a Lyra Clavis D.C. is as safe a bet as they come: sonically neutral but musically exciting, with the lowest level of surface noise we've heard---and still less than two grand. Does twice that much money buy twice as much music?
      I don't think so. More music, yes. And more of other things, too, like the sheer pleasure of going against the audio grain and investing in a handmade, one-of-a-kind anything.
      But the Miyabi/47 is different enough that it deserves a following, howsoever unconcerned with thrift that following proves to be. If your idea of hi-fi bliss is a system that thrills you like a dive in a cold lake, and that never fails to focus on the musical ideas contained in your records, then you really have to hear this Miyabi---because I'm not sure there's anything else that can beat it.
      I would have called Mr. Takeda on the telephone the day I broke his first cartridge, but I didn't know the word for sorry. Several months later, however, I have learned the word for his cartridge: koukotsu. Thank you, Mr. Takeda---and now, when are you going to introduce that Miyabi tonearm you've been working on?