Shelter Harmony Cartridge

Description

Shelter Harmony – Ultimate Line

Shelter’s flagship model, the Harmony, employs dry carbon fiber (CFRP) for the body shell. CFRP provides superb acoustic characteristics and pairs ideally with the newly designed motor assembly. This combination ensures excellent musical reproduction even on records with less than optimal recordings.

Dry carbon, unlike wet carbon, is designed in layers and unique molding. Harmony, utilizing the CFRP, has a compression rating of 60-tons whereas the conventional process is only 24-tons. The benefit is that the resonant frequency of CFRP is outside of any audible frequency. In addition, it provides a high degree of internal damping along with superb isolation characteristics that protects the body from extraneous vibration and noise. Each of these design features ensure that the Harmony produces no coloration, and is whisper quiet and is extraordinarily sensitive to even the most demanding and subtle musical passages.

The motor assembly is an all-new design using hard aluminum cantilever and OFC wiring. Hard aluminum allows us to firmly affix the diamond stylus tip to a rigid, yet responsive bass. This allows the stylus to receive and reproduce every bit of information within the grooves of your favorite recordings. The length of the cantilever is slightly shorter than typical to increase the strength to output voltage ratio. Normal aluminum cantilevers often develop a tendency to make the playback sound slightly bigger, but the stylus chip is designed to line-contact with its curvature radius to 1.6 x 0.3mil (0.04 x 0.007mm) to achieve the best balance and increased tracking capability at the same time.

Shelter MC Phono Cartridge

Shelter MC phono cartridges are divided into two major lines. The first series is the “Ultimate Line,” which features 60t dry-carbon fiber in the housing, aiming at the future of analog playback. Another series, called the “Legendary Line,” faithfully continues the matured analog playback technology of the 1980s.

Ultimate Line

The MC phono cartridge explores the unknown possibilities of analog playback. The Ultimate Line is an extreme MC phono cartridge series, with a material structure renewed after almost a quarter-century by adopting ultra-degree hardness dry-carbon fiber in its housing while maintaining Shelter’s fundamental motor system design philosophy.

The compression ratio of the 60t class carbon fiber used in the Ultimate Line is significantly higher than the conventional 24t dry-carbon fiber, a world-first in phono cartridges. This material’s characteristics—resonance-free, high internal loss, and superb shielding effect—allow the 60t carbon fiber to reproduce subtle signals without coloration and provide deep quietness.

The flagship model, Harmony, uses solid dry-carbon fiber for the entire housing, while the Accord model uses it for the base plate. By adopting Japan’s leading-edge carbon fiber technology, Shelter’s MC phono cartridge explores unknown possibilities in analog playback, offering an enhanced listening experience through the Ultimate Line.

The Shelter sound brightens an individuality of analog sound.

The sound timbre of audio system mirrors each owner whose values and lifestyle so it never be the same sound. Especially the analog playback is very sensitive because the sound character immediately changes with only changing the screw which fixes the cartridge and head-shell. This means that the hobby of audio isn’t a thing to compete superior or inferior of an absolute sound, but it is indicating just like ways of self-expression to complete the painting a piece of picture. Through the smooth and warmth sound character the Shelter phono cartridge was born to realize the sound character that is only possible to delineate by you. The balmy sound may feel a lack for the first listening, but it doesn’t become weary for many years and there is always new discovery. This smooth, warmth and balmy sound is what we put the true personality to the Shelter product.

Aim for true satisfaction over a long time.

Shelter MC phono cartridge avoids novel design and providing simple structure with minimum model changes, as the result the product has a long lifetime characteristic. Moreover, we also consider to prevent sound character change occur during the product lifetime by only using carefully selected component part. In addition, as another characteristic of Shelter, a single individual designer supervises all products since the company establishment, also sincerely coping to the after follow of those products we sold. For example, even model 701 which was sold in 1986, can change to current model at the cost of stylus change. We flatter ourselves that obedient and natural playback sound of Shelter phono cartridge captivates your heart and is activating in your listening room for a long time as reference phono cartridge.

Ozwa Yasuo, the funder and designer

Born in Tokyo. He was fascinated from boyhood by the timbre of music instruments and started self-designing audio products to realize high fidelity sound reproduction. He designed many tube amplifiers when he was in junior high school age, and majored in electrical engineering at the university with aiming an amplifier designer, but he found the charm of analog pickup which can practice the whole design of sound reproduction that he imagines. In 1982 he joined Fidelity Research (FR) and started its career as a phono cartridge designer. He participated to design MC phono cartridges of MCX-3, MCX-5 and other products during his work at FR. He then became independent in 1986 to establish Shelter, thereafter he has been designing and developing the MC phono cartridge throughout his life.