Preamp Deal of the Century

Bwhite - The fact that the units are NOT identical and have the flavor of being individually built is very appealing to me. The problem I don't want to have is being on the receiving end of a product made the other side of the world with internal quality problems because of pressure by the designer to meet schedules.

Quality Control can become a big issue, I've seen it happen to many small businesses when they get stretched too thin. I will speak with Mick about this concern. Thank you and the others so much for your excellent comments and insight on this company.

Tubegroover - in the off chance that you have internal quality problems with the unit, it can easily be fixed by anyone with electronics and soldering experience. In fact, I think my preamp is much better after going to a repair shop. The Engineer (Scott Frankland of Wavestream Kinetics) who worked on my preamp made some very good modifications to my preamp which were simple but effective.

Thinks like separating the internal wires better, sheilding a few of the non-critial wires, putting the unit on a scope and fine tuning the Left and Right gain, etc really made a BIG difference in overall performance. Having Scott look at my preamp and do the fine tuning cost a whopping $50 bucks but the return was outstanding. I would recommend owners of Supratek products take them to someone who has built amps/preamps professionally to learn if there are any quick and dirty ways to improve the performance.

I think Mick's recent "extended" schedule for delivery represents his commitment to increasing the quality of his products. When I ordered the preamp, Mick was turning these out in less than 2 weeks. That has changed signifcantly of late and I expect his more current products are higher in initial quality as a result.

Bwhite, do you think that Scott would mind being the U.S. "point man" for mods of these units? I know he has a business of his own to tend, but he seems to be very knowledgable and reasonable (a combination of traits difficult to find these days). Certainly any of us considering this product would not begrudge the relatively small tariff for optimizing this product.

I'd be a little more comfortable knowing that someone's around who's not afraid to (apologies to whoever I'm plagarizing) stick his fingers into something to find out what going on.

I got my Syrah with the Jarrah Wood base and the polished chrome top. I could find NO bad spots or imperfections on the unit anywhere. My unit has worked beautifully from the time I opened it up and after 2 months, it only gets better! I agree with BWhite. I believe Micks quality control will only get better with time.

Arooj - Scott has talked to Mick and plans to provide service to Supratek owners in the California Bay Area (near San Francisco). I believe Mick has other recommended service agents elsewhere in the US.

When I engaged Scott he immediately agreed to do the work for the Supratek - no problem. My guess is that you will easily find several people in the US who can do such work.