Stéphane’s new Mutech Hayabusa and Sculpture A Orange Mat

Stéphane is more than a HiFi amateur, he has also designed is own line of power cables and interconnects. He came to our Parisian showroom in order to compare different cartridges. He wanted to find the perfect matching cartridge for his system in order to have a lot of fun listening to music but also to be able to demonstrate the abilities of his interconnects to his own customers. 

In his system he uses a Whest Titan Reference 5. We were lucky enough to have Whest Titan phonostage available (thank you Régis !) for his comparison session at our Parisian Showroom. 

His initial thoughts was about a Phasemation PP-500 or PP-2000. He already had heard the PP-2000 with us and he liked the energy and the soundstage of this cartridge. On an other hand the My Sonic Lab Eminent GL was also another lead, last but not least was the Mutech Hayabusa which he had some excellent feedback from one of our east of France customer (thank you Gilles).

We used the STST Motus II DQ (direct drive suspended deck) with a Schröder CB-L tonearm with internal silver wiring for comparison basis. Each cartridge was fine tuned with it’s particular mounting plate. Swapping from one cartridge to another is quick task for us to do as we do have precise VTF and antiskating measurement sets for each of these. For Stéphane it took just a few minutes to understand that the Mutech Hayabusa was the ideal cartridge for him. In fact it felt like he had fallen in love at first sight that was confirmed by a fantastic listening session on the Döhmann Helix Two mk2  with matching Super Low Impedance 1:15 Consolidated Audio step-up and Thrax Orpheus phonostage.

Second step was to visit Stéphane and set-up his Mutech Hayabusa in his own HiFi rig. His turntable is a VPI Classic 3 with a unipivot arm. With the help of the Analog Magik we achieved more than 31dB of channel separation on both right and left channel : an excellent performance.

To finalize the set-up of Stéphane’s VPI we had brought two Sculpture A turntable mat, The Grey Mat which is designed to dampen slightly trebles and The Orange which is neutral sounding. Both mats are built from vegetal fibres and are meant to optimize the coupling of the record with the turntable platter, something that has a real meaning when you drop your record directly on a metal surface. Stéphane chose The Orange as it enhanced even better detail rendition and made the overall result more musical. 

Listening Stéphane’s system made us fully understand why he had so quickly chosen the Mutech Hayabusa. It was indeed a perfect match.