Miyajima Shilabe

Product Code: MJC003

£2,900.00

ex-vat: £ 2,416.67

Noriyuki Miyajima has been producing extraordinary artisanal cartridges for decades. His designs, which feature an ingenious cross-coil moving coil generator and damping system, produce a full-bodied, supremely musical sound that recalls vintage audio systems, but with the high resolution and articulate frequency extremes of the finest modern cartridges. All Miyajima cartridges are low-compliance, and therefore suitable for high- and medium-mass tonearms, like the Thomas Schick and some of Frank Schröder’s designs.

The Miyajima Shilabe features a nude Shibata stylus, and is a Stereophile Class A recommended component.

Press Reviews

“The Miyajima Shilabe was consistently present, colorful, and downright chunky—that last adjective, I see, being the one that appears most frequently in my listening notes on the subject. All in all, my Shilabe experience was, by far, the closest I’ve heard a “normal” phono cartridge come to sounding like an Ortofon SPU or an EMT OFD. Again excepting the audio world’s very few remaining pickup heads, it was also the closest I’ve heard a stereo cartridge come to delivering the meat, the force, the sheer solidity of mono.” (Art Dudley)

Read the full review.

Stereophile

“The Shilabe is a remarkable cartridge. It seems warm but is simultaneously resolved. There is beautiful deep bass and a strong slightly warm midrange. Noting else can really be added or subtracted. Unless I told you that beside the Air Tight PC-1 Supreme (but that’s another story) the Shilabe is really the best cartridge I’ve ever heard? Or that I liked it extremely much? Or that when we fit a turntable with it we forget about technology and concentrate on the music? Or that it will become a part of my reference system? Well I’m telling you now…”

Read the full review.

6moons

Specs

Body material
African blackwood
Stylus
Nude Shibata
Frequency response
20 Hz to 32 kHz
Weight
9.7 g
Tracking force
2.5 to 3.2 g, 3.0 g recommended
Internal impedance
16 Ohms
Recommended load
100 Ohms
Output
0.23 mV
Compliance
About 8×10-6cm/dyne