Greg Beron at United Home Audio has launched “an all out assault on tape playback” with his brand new UHA SuperDeck. “This is the ‘ne plus ultra’ of high-fidelity playback, built from the very best of every single piece and part, cost no object,” he says.
Selected highlights from the list of ingredients include:
- An outboard power supply that converts mains AC to DC power, so that both the tape transport and the head amp run 100% on DC power; the power supply has three toroidal transformers, one feeding the tape transport and the other two feeding independent right and left audio channel power supplies.
- A 100% true dual mono circuit from the power supply to the outputs.
- The best fully discrete pure class A gain stages.
- Custom designed VU meters: large with black bezels, and with a switch to take the VU meters out of the signal path for the purest sound.
- Hyper-pure copper audio boards with real gold sandwiched above and below the copper.
- Ceramic composite board dielectric that will not allow high frequencies to permeate the dielectric and smear the sound.
- The best handmade capacitors – SuperCaps by Rel Caps (now owned by Wilson Audio).
- The finest hand-matched resistors available.
- Billet aluminium chassis lined with Richlite for vibration damping.
- An integrated rack system that suspends the tape transport in a gel to avoid acoustic and mechanical vibrations.
- HifiStay footers under the head amp and outboard power supply to completely isolate these units from vibrational energy.
- All Furutech high-end chassis mount connectors.
If you’re excited by this as I am, hop over to www.unitedhomeproducts.com/the_uha_superdeck.htm where Greg has helpfully mapped out a load more detail along with a nice selection of photos.
And if, like me, you’re desperate for a listen and struggling to be patient until the Covid crisis has passed and we can travel to hi-fi shows once again, in the meantime you can get a taste of how this incredible piece of engineering sounds courtesy of Jonathan Valin, who has just reviewed the SuperDeck for The Absolute Sound. Lucky Jonathan!
“Beron’s new creation, the dual-mono, three-chassis UHA SuperDeck, is a different (and unquestionably superior) critter,” he writes. “If you want to hear recorded music sound as much like the real thing as recorded music can sound, then you should give the SuperDeck a long listen. Put simply, it is the best tape machine he’s built (by far) and, given a great tape, the most realistic source component I’ve yet heard.”
Here’s the review: www.theabsolutesound.com/articles/united-home-audio-superdeck
It also includes an interview with Greg, always an interesting guy to talk to. UHA customers may be happy to know that “any UHA deck can be upgraded. You could actually go from the very first Phase1 deck I ever made to a SuperDeck. I actually have a customer doing that right now.”
Envious, moi? You bet!
PS. You can read more about UHA’s portfolio of reel-to-reel decks in an earlier blog: Interview: Greg Beron of ‘hybrid’ R2R deck maker United Home Audio.
Dave Denyer: The Reel-to-Reel Rambler 