From watch parts to gramophone needles.

Nagaoka began as a maker of watch parts. The company’s own history dates it to May 1940, when Eitarō Nagaoka founded a small partnership, the Nagaoka Watch Parts Works, with 30 employees; Japanese Wikipedia places it in Toshima, in Tokyo. The name is the family’s, not the city of Nagaoka in Niigata’s, and the business should not be confused with the Osaka-based Nagaoka Corporation, a listed maker of water- and energy-plant machinery.

Jewels for watches led to jewels for records. The company says it began trading with Seikosha, Citizen and Orient in 1947 and in the same year started selling sapphire gramophone needles; Japanese Wikipedia, whose article is flagged as poorly sourced, puts the first sapphire stylus in the early 1950s, so we note the difference. In December 1950 the business was incorporated as Nagaoka Seiki Hōseki Kōgyō, with about 100 staff.

The company dates Japan’s first diamond replacement stylus to January 1956, a claim we give as its own. Its history then records a “metal-bonded diamond” method for mass production in 1961, refined in 1966; a watch-jewel plant at Ōtsuki, in Yamanashi, by 1960, when it had about 300 staff; a new headquarters and stylus factory at Ōtsuka in Tokyo in 1966, with its own listening room; and, in December 1967, the NR-I, a ribbon-type stereo cartridge. In 1969 it set up Yamagata Nagaoka at Higashine, in Yamagata prefecture, to machine watch jewels, and in 1971 the parent took the name Nagaoka. In 1974, the company says, a technical tie-up with Toshiba’s research laboratory produced the Ultra EX stylus for four-channel records.

Moving permalloy and a square body.

Nagaoka is best known for styli and for one family of cartridges. The MP series — the letters stand for moving permalloy — puts a small piece of nickel-iron alloy, rather than a magnet, at the end of the cantilever, while the magnet and coils stay fixed. Nagaoka says the lighter moving part lets the stylus follow the groove more freely than in a moving-magnet design. Hi-Fi News explained in 2025 that the principle refines the moving-iron method “introduced by Pickering some 80 years ago” and is in practice a subset of moving magnet; it dated the MP line to 1979, “itself based on earlier cartridges from the company.”

The current range on the company’s website runs from the MP-100 and MP-110 through the MP-150, MP-200 and MP-300 to the MP-500, which Hi-Fi News said had been introduced about fifteen years earlier, and the MP-700, a new flagship timed to the company’s 85th anniversary. There are also a mono model, the MP-MONO; a stylus for 78rpm records; DJ cartridges; and the JT-80, sold under the old Jeweltone name, which the company says won a “Best Buy Components 2022” award from the Japanese magazine stereo.

The Hi-Fi News review of the MP-700, by Jamie Biesemans with measurements by Paul Miller, appeared in the August 2025 issue, scored it 91 per cent for sound quality and called it “a worthy flagship.” It described a boron cantilever, a nude microridge diamond, a frame of ultra-duralumin and a 4mV output, and noted that the owner can replace the stylus — an advantage over most moving-coil designs. It also called the “iconic square MP design,” with a gold-coloured Nagaoka inscription on the front, and the transparent plastic dome the cartridges are packed in, trademarks of the brand.

Replacement styli remain a large part of the business. The website lists styli for cartridges from about twenty other brands, among them Audio-Technica, Shure, Ortofon, Technics, Sony and Pioneer, and says Nagaoka makes styli for models whose original makers have stopped producing them. Since 2016 it has also sold audio under a sub-brand, VINON, and since 2017 outdoor electronics under another, movio, alongside headphones, earphones and record-care accessories.

Japan’s cartridge makers.

These seven makers belong to a small trade. A phono cartridge is a few grams of magnet, coil and diamond, largely assembled by hand, yet only a few of these brands say who does the work.

Goldring, which traces its roots to Berlin in 1906, belongs to Armour Home Electronics of Bishop’s Stortford, a subsidiary of Q Acoustics Limited, Companies House records show. It says its cartridges are “designed and handmade in the UK,” though its own history says it outsourced much component manufacturing in the 1990s. Soundsmith says every product is “hand-crafted” at its factory in Peekskill, New York.

Sumiko, the cartridge brand of a Berkeley, California, distributor bought by Fine Sounds of Milan in 2011, Stereophile reported, says all its cartridges are hand-built by Excel Sound in Yokohama.

Three are Japanese. Nagaoka, a family stylus maker based in Higashine, Yamagata, makes an MP-700 that is “still completely built by hand in Japan,” Hi-Fi News reported in 2025. ZYX works from Nagara in Chiba; its founder says he managed OEM cartridges for several makers at Namiki Precision Jewel before 1986. My Sonic Lab gives a Tokyo address; its US distributor, quoted by Stereophile in 2018, said founder Yoshio Matsudaira had earlier made cartridges for Air Tight.

Benz Micro, the Swiss name, is hardest to place: its website is a holding page, and the Swiss business-name index lists a Benz-Micro AG as deleted in 1997.

This guide sets out what can be checked about each brand — who founded it, who owns it, and what it says about where its products are made — and marks clearly what rests only on the company’s own word.

One name, three companies.

The Nagaoka of today is not quite the company founded in 1940. Japanese Wikipedia says the original company was wound up in 1990, while still solvent, as record sales fell after the arrival of the compact disc, and that its business was divided among three companies. The company’s own history does not describe a winding-up, but it separates the “old Nagaoka” from the “new Nagaoka group” and records that Nagaoka Seimitsu, at Ōtsuki, and Nagaoka Trading, in Tokyo, both began in September 1990. In April 1999 Yamagata Nagaoka opened a new factory and renamed itself Nagaoka Co., Ltd.

That company, at Higashine, gives its own founding date as July 1969; besides audio products it machines carbide blades, diamond tools, measuring probes and magnet parts. Nagaoka Trading, at Sendagaya in Tokyo, sells the audio range, and Nagaoka Seimitsu makes styli and assembles accessories. The company profile names the same president, surnamed Nagaoka, at all three; Japanese Wikipedia lists Nagaoka Co. as Nagaoka Trading’s main shareholder; and Hi-Fi News described the business in 2025 as “a family concern and one of the largest manufacturers of stylus tips worldwide.”

On manufacturing, Nagaoka says it makes its cartridges by hand and inspects every one, from drawing parts out of sheet metal and forming aluminium tube to bonding and polishing the diamond, and claims to be the only maker able to do every step from the record groove to the connection to the amplifier itself. We give that as its claim. Hi-Fi News reported that the MP-700 “is still completely built by hand in Japan.” Abroad, the company’s list of distributors includes MoFi Distribution in the United States, and Hi-Fi News named Sound Design Distribution of Cardiff as its British supplier.

For a design guide, Nagaoka shows how a parts maker can give a small component a recognisable face — the square body and the clear dome. Compare Audio-Technica, another Japanese maker of moving-magnet cartridges and styli, and Ortofon. For this guide we use a deep navy, a steel grey and a gold with a sans, an unofficial interpretation; no product or logo is reproduced.

Keep Nagaoka’s identity on hand — save it to a board in the Made Good inspiration library.