Are there any other Reel To Reel Decks that have won as many awards?
Do they come with a warranty?
Do they have the latest state of the art designs or electronic components?
Are they in one wife friendly box, that you can actually lift yourself?
Can you still get parts from the factory?
Back to United Home Audio Audiophile Quality Tape Decks
Why Buy a UHA Open Reel Tape Deck?
1.) New UHA playback and record preamp design:
The latest state of the art 2017 designs featuring the following innovations.
– New for 2017 – Pure Class A Output.
– Hyper pure thick copper preamp boards with silver solder points.
– Most direct signal paths possible with no muting circuits or lesser connections from tape heads to output connectors.
– No capacitors in the signal path. This revolutionary design takes care of the DC offset and does not amplify
any DC from one gain stage to the next. This avoids the sonic signature and negative influence of capacitors in the signal path.
– The finest electronic parts available all chosen to compliment the dense information contained in magnetic tape.
2.) Tape heads:
– The new UHA custom tape heads were chosen after a long search for the best sounding tape head in the world.
The heads both record and playback are made only for UHA and the new preamps record and play are designed only for the UHA tape head.
It stands to reason that using a generic tape “head amp” that is designed to be used with all types of tape heads is not the equal of a purpose built tape head and it’s matching purpose built preamp.
3.) Internal wiring and connectors:
The internal wiring is a mix of new old stock wire and Synergistic Research wire. Each wire chosen for it’s sonic qualities
in the circuitry. This has been a long trial and lots of research to come up with the proper wire for each area of the deck.
Cardas XLR’s are used on all decks and on the higher end decks WBT Next-Gen RCA connectors are used.
4.) Power supply:
On the Phase11 and the new Ultima Series Decks a new power transformer is installed inside the deck to run the preamps only.
This is a high quality device that was chosen for it’s sonic purity. Also each gain stage has it’s own power filtering caps for
both the positive and negative, this delivers perfect power to the preamp.
5.) Tape path:
Conventional wisdom in reel to reel tape decks dictates that one should buy a 40 to 60 year old studio deck.
That is like buying a 40 to 60 year old car and driving the 2015 Formula 1 circuit in it.
Do you think you would win?
These old decks have large AC motors in them that create more magnetic flux than what typically adheres to well used tape heads!
The motors cost lots of money and just to change the bearings on a deck’s motors can cost $800.
The tape path of the UHA deck (built until 2002) uses reliable compact DC motors, they are quiet very speed
stable and most important, they are reliable.
UHA has never had a motor go bad on a deck yet!
Servo tape tension control arms and computer logic tape control result in zero error tape handling, a UHA deck has never harmed a tape.
Some of the older decks have “E prompts” that control the tape path operation and these prompts can be lost and need to be reloaded, not good!
Compact and weighing 70 lbs makes the UHA deck able to be moved by one person, studio decks weigh 200lbs (+/-).
Older studio decks will do 3.75, 7.5,15 and 30 inch per second playback and record in NAB, IEC and AES equalization!
That is a literal birds nest of wiring and electronic circuitry, it degrades the signal path.
6.) Recording:
The attention to detail on the UHA decks did not end with award winning playback.
The same attention to detail and innovation has been invested in the recording capability of the UHA decks.
Ultra clean signal path, finest preamp boards and electronic circuitry internal wiring and connectors are all UHA extreme quality.
The result are recordings that are extremly revealing detailed and that convey the excitment of the original source!
