Hana SL

I've been meaning to sell this highly regarded cartridge for a while now and decided summer might be a good time.

Not much can be said by me that hasn't already been mentioned on various audio websites or across the professional audio reviewer landscape at large: this is an absolutely fantastic cartridge.

I had this installed on my beloved Rega P5 for a couple of months last summer and enjoyed it immensely. I was using a Trichord Dino Mk II/Dino+ phono stage and the results were excellent all 'round. The Hana SL tracks really well and has a very smooth but finely detailed presentation. It sounded so good in fact, that I wondered whether my now relatively old P5 was getting the most out of it. 

I called my friend, who happens to be a Rega dealer of long standing, about upgrading; he suggested the RP8 as being a serious improvement to the P5. He went ahead and ordered a RP8 for me, but found that Rega's US distributor gave him a nice package deal by including the Rega Apheta 2 cartridge. I went ahead and bought the Rega combo (at a nice discount) and have had the Hana SL packaged and sitting on shelf since.

It is always hard to gauge actual usage but I can't imagine that I played any more than 40-50 LPs through it at most. I clean every LP that I play, new and used, with a Nitty Gritty RCM and Audio Intelligent or MFSL cleaning fluid. I clean the stylus after every full LP's worth of play with an Onzow Zerodust. This should be about as "like new" as one would be likely to get. I had the same friend who sold me the Rega take a look at it recently and he said it looked "pristine".