Shelter has been manufacturing high-end phono cartridges since 1986. Shelter cartridges bring together advanced materials and technology with the very best traditional manufacturing techniques. Each Shelter cartridge is handmade by skilled craftmen in Shelter’s workshop northeast of Tokyo. Uniquely, every one is inspected and quality assured by Yasuo Ozawa himself, the designer and founder of Shelter.

Yasuo Ozawa was born in Tokyo and was fascinated from boyhood by the timbre of music instruments. From an early age, he started designing audio products exploring high fidelity sound reproduction. In his teens, he designed many tube amplifiers, and majored in electrical engineering at the university, originally intending to be an amplifier designer. Along the way, though, he discovered the allure of the analogue pickup: the source component which translates the grooves in vinyl to a tiny electrical signal. The rest is history.