Urushi revisited. Please see above for my original and long-standing opinion of my Urushi. ( I say “my Urushi” because these are hand made , and there may be sample to sample variations.) all of the foregoing evaluations were made using my upstairs audio system which consists of atma-sphere amplifiers driving Soundlab 845 PX speakers. The preamplifier was usually my atma -sphere MP1or the J & R solid-state phonolinepreamp. Most recently in this system the Urushi was mounted on my Kenwood L07D tonearm using an Ortofon LH 9000 head shell, which weighs 18g by itself. In prior years it was on a Triplanar. The point of all this is to suggest that effective mass seems to have a great deal of effect on the sound of the Urushi . Because recently I moved the Urushi to my basement system which uses the beveridge 2SWs driven by a Manley Steelhead. The Urushi is now mounted on my Fidelity Research FR64S tonearm which has much higher effective mass than the L07D tonearm. Still using the 18g Ortofon headshell. The sound of the Urushi is transformed in this set-up. It’s everything I hoped for when I bought it 10 years ago. Perhaps it is true of all the high end Koetsu cartridges; they really need high effective mass to perform best. It’s not a revelation. Others have noted it before me, but just putting a heavy headshell on a medium mass tonearm, as on the L07D, was not sufficient to bring out the best in this cartridge.
