Koetsu Rosewood Signature Platinum Phono Cartridge

KOETSU ROSEWOOD SIGNATURE PLATINUM PHONO CARTRIDGE
- retipped by groovetickler. See provenance below.

The Koetsu story is well known to deeply serious record playing audio enthusiasts. But not so much with the younger ears who were reared in the digital span of CDs, downloads, iTunes, Spotify, and streaming, who only recently were exposed to the joy of listening to analog records and phonography. It’s worthy to recap its short tale here and appreciate its illustrious history and accomplishments.

The company was founded in the 1970s by Kyoto-born Yoshiaki Sugano, who selected the name Koetsu to honor the spirit of his 17th century ancestor, the noted artist and calligrapher Honami Koetsu. It is said that Sugano himself was a 20th century renaissance man. Although a significant chapter of his life was devoted to his career as an upper-level executive at Toyota — he retired from this job at age 60 — Sugano’s lifelong passions encompassed painting, sword-making, metallurgy, and Western classical music. His reverence for the latter would lead Sugano to stride onto his second career, crafting fastidiously designed and artfully-made phonograph cartridges, in the embodiment of the Japanese shukonin — dainty works of art, meticulously built, by hand, to exquisiteness.

Initially, Sugano tinkered with the inner workings of commercial models, modifying parts to improve their performance. And during a stint at the Supex company, Sugano had a hand in developing the 900 model, which some view as something of a Koetsu prototype.

For twenty-plus years Sugano crafted Koetsus, adding new models as well as cementing the luster to the company’s reputation. But, as time will, age caught up with him. In the early 1990s, then in his eighties, Sugano handed over the legacy of crafting Koetsus to his son and now-shokunin, Fumihiko, who crafts to this day.

The current edition of the Rosewood ($3995) features a natural (unvarnished) rosewood body, copper coil wiring, and samarium-cobalt magnets. The Rosewood Signature ($5495), so thoroughly reviewed by Dick Olsher in Issue 295, also sports the same housing and copper wiring, but the magnets are permendur, another type of cobalt-iron alloy. The Rosewood Signature uses the most tightly matched coil and core sets, offering more precise focus and a larger soundstage than the Rosewood Standard.

The Rosewood Signature Platinum ($8495) offers a stiffer body composed of lacquered, aged rosewood, plus the rare platinum magnets and silver-plated 6N- copper coils normally reserved for Koetsu’s stone-body cartridges. "It’s the perfect choice for those who lust after a stone model but require a cartridge with less mass or simply prefer the look of rosewood.”¹

The Koetsu Rosewood Signature Platinum is a remarkable cartridge. It changes your expectations of what a cartridge can do as it lifts the performance of the entire system's sound quality. It does an exceptional job of melding lushness, harmonic fullness, sweetness, and musicality with today's quest for linearity, extension, air, focus, palpability, and openness. Once you experience this celestial level of natural sound quality reproduction, there is no going back.

The Rosewood Signature Platinum is not only a technically marvelous music-reproducing device; it’s also one that seduces our ears, mind, and viscerality with notable beauty and intellectual and emotional pleasure. Very artful, very Japanese²

Note: This particular unit is brand new and unused. The customer upon receipt contacted us and complained that the cartridge was a missing the stylus tip and requested its return. Upon inspection, we found the claim to be genuine. The tip had indeed fallen off. We have seen this rare accident with boron cantlevered styli. In the interim, we kept the cartridge in our vault and only recently decided to have it retipped. By groovetickler, one of the best retippers in the country. Thus also, its fetching price.

Koetsu Rosewood Signature Platinum Phono Cartridge Specifications
- Frequency response: 20Hz-100kHz
- Output voltage: 0.3mV
- Channel balance @ 1kHz: 0.50dB
- Channel separation @ 1kHz: 25dB
- Stylus type: Koetsu Diamond Replacement 8/35 micron Ogura Vital PH “Fine Line” LineContact
- Cantilever: Boron
- Tracking force: 1.8-2.0 g
- Compliance: 5 x 10-6 cm/dyne @ 100 Hz
- Coil Wiring: Silverplated Copper
- Magnet: Platinum
- Recommended Impedance: 30 Ohms
- Body: Rosewood with clear lacquer
- Weight: 9 g

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Footnote 1: Wayne Garcia, " Koetsu Rosewood Signature Platinum & My Sonic Lab Signature Gold Moving-Coil Cartridges", The Absolute Sound, Aug 24, 2021.
Footnote 2: Ibid.