Hana SL or ML?

@anovak The Moon 390 is an amazing unit. It’s a good solid state preamp, DAC/streamer, phono stage and headphone amp. While the phono stage is no slouch, I might get a better separate phono stage later on. I pair it with Moon 330A power amp and the pairing is quite good!

Interesting you avoid more number of circuits to keep the signal chain simple! How do you do that though on your Rotel preamp?

The Rotel has an option, "bypass," that will send the incoming signal only through the circuit that controls gain, or volume.  Otherwise the signal is not changed in any way.  So, I send the signal from my cartridge, to phonostage, to Rotel preamp, and out to the power amp essentially unfettered aside from the ability to control the volume of it sent to the power amp.

I'm running my Hana SL at 470 ohms through a Whest PS.30 RDT-SE at 55dB gain.  I estimate about 50 hours of run in.  That Shibata stylus does make you work for it (spot on 2.0 grams stylus force/1.8 grams antiskate). Once dialed in, the Hana gets it done for sure.  Come Springtime I'll try 1.6k loading and report back. 

Happy listening to all!

You’re all missing the key point.
The main difference between SL and ML is the stylus profile:

SL - Shibata
ML - MicroLine

MicroLine profile is better and life span of this profile is longer.

When you’re buying Moving Coil cartridge it is very important how long you can use it, it depends primarily on the stylus profile. Always buy an MC with the most advanced stylus profile like MicroLine, MicroRidge, Gyger, Replicant 100 ... etc

When your MC cartridge is worn, even if it was relatively cheap cartridge like Hana, you will pay at least half of the retail price again just for retip, even more if you will change the cantilever from aluminum to a better one.

Anyone can explain in details what Hana will do for you when your cartridge is worn? Can you ship it back for re-tip to Hana (aka Excel Sound) or they will replace your worn cartridge with a new one ? What is the price ?

Because when you will re-tip it with something else you will get different sound.

I have gone from the Hana ML to the SL on a Clearaudio Performance DC. I have what I consider a pretty revealing system downstream and I heard a clear difference. I really liked the SL but the ML improves everything the SL does well and makes it better. More refined, better detail, separation, and frequency extremes. Bass was clearly better. If your budget allows for it and your system is revealing enough you should hear a difference IMO, at least I did. To what degree will be the question, and it will be system dependent as will all things like this. It's hard with cartridges to demo both on the table you have, but luckily I was able to do that at my dealer before I pulled the trigger on the ML.

To me it's worth the extra $450 at buy in, or trade up (that's what I did).