Union Audio’s gold four.valve mixer: 550 units, £2,495, shipping January
The Limited 55 Edition pairs valve stages with elara.4 MkII phono inputs, and its gold detailing is designed to match the Technics SL-1200 anniversary deck.
Union Audio is making just 550 of the four.valve Limited 55 Edition worldwide. It costs £2,495 including VAT, and the first production units arrive in January 2027. It is a hybrid of two of the company’s mixers with RIAA phono stages on the inputs, valve stages and a discrete summing circuit, and its gold detailing is designed to complement the Technics SL-1200 55th Anniversary Edition.
The name is the recipe: it crosses the elara.4 MkII with the four.valve. The RIAA and line input stages come from the elara.4 MkII’s channels, and the valve stages come from Union Audio’s Valve range. The summing stage uses a custom discrete op-amp designed by ARJ.
The cosmetics are built around the Technics pairing. The front panel is Cerakoted aluminum with aluminum knobs from the elara range, and the faders are damped. The VU meters get a new illuminated treatment, and the RIAA/line selector buttons light in two colors, which is a useful cue when you are switching between turntables and line sources in a dim booth.
The Technics deck it is meant to sit beside has gold on the tonearm, platter rim, strobe marks and knobs, and is limited to 12,000 units. It is the latest limited SL-1200 tie-in after the Aimé Leon Dore edition earlier this year.
You can try the mixer at Amsterdam Dance Event, in the Gear Test Lab at Het Ketelhuis in Westerpark, October 21 to 23. The lab is part of ADE Lab Discovery, which is free and open to anyone.
