Set-Up Accessory Reviews

How many times do we just “make do” in the moment when it comes to handling some of the finer points and little details as we’re tweaking our LP playback systems? More often than not, I’ve found myself reaching for my rubber-grip Energizer flashlight whenever I’ve been calibrating, fiddling with, and/or tweaking something on or near my PerspeX turntable and its homebase — not to mention whenever I’m checking and rechecking the cables and connections for whatever receivers, amps, phono preamps, and speakers are in my system at any given time. I keep thinking to myself, “Do I need to get me one of those bleepin’ underground headlamps to put on my noggin while I’m doing all this stuff?”

When I was entrenched in the elongated process of moving my home lab location last year, I did make a mental note during that time to see about getting a proper task light to use with my system instead of continually riding the default low-grade flashlight route (or, shudder, even the light on my iPhone) — and that time is now. (Besides, I need to redesignate the use of said flashlight for other vital things down here in the listening library.)

Well, the fine folks at Reliable must have heard me thinking about this across the Canadian border up in their Toronto HQ — no doubt deciphering how my lighting-centric thoughts tended to repeatedly pulsate in code as “YYZ” — so they recently sent me one of their much, much smarter solutions for such tasks. Say hello to the Reliable UberLight Frame, which comes in two model options — the 7200TL black (the version I have) and the 7100TL white.

Some of you may be familiar with Reliable’s earlier (and still current) UberLight Flex models — an LED task light that was initially given the seal of approval here on AP back in March 2021. At the time of its introduction, company owner and fellow audiophile Robert Kahn found that the Flex could work beyond its intended usage for desk/table-oriented applications and also be put to even better use to shine additional, and much needed, light on turntables — and, frankly, other gear as well — for a variety of visually inclined and tweak-oriented tasks. (Many of us, of course, have often seen high-end lights/LEDs of a similar nature being deployed during numerous tradeshow demos, especially when they’re taking place in darkened rooms. The concept isn’t novel, but it’s good to see the added product traction.)

Fast-forward about four years after the Flex rollout to the here and now, where Kahn and company have specifically designed the Reliable UberLight Frame with a litany of newer — and even more flexible — features for the discerning audiophile in mind.

Features & Specs
According to Reliable, the cast-aluminum, fixed-right-angle UberLight Frame offers up to 100 customizable settings — and it includes six brightness levels, three color temperatures (Daylight, Ultra Bright, and Warm Light), and six touch zones. The Frame’s LED delivers up to 600lumens with a CRI (Color Rendering Index) of 90+, and its lifespan is up to 50,000hrs (which should be just enough time for me to get through listening to all the Yes and Tangerine Dream LPs in my collection, I think). The UberLight Frame also offers a full 360º swivel and 30º tilt adjustment.

Three mounting options are available — base, clamp, and table mount. The versatile 6in USB-C power cord has a universal plug and can be adapted for use in North American, Europe, the UK, and Australia with ease. A rechargeable remote with a built-in LED flashlight is also included — but you won’t find it with any of the other parts in the box, as it’s nestled up in the underside of the light arm for (re)charging. Since this remote is pretty slim and likely to be easily lost/misplaced, I’ve tended to return it to the recharging position whenever I’m not actively using it.

Dimensions of the UberLight Frame are 17.2 x 3.1 x 17.3 x in (w/h/d), with its adjustable light-angle portion measuring 11.5in long. When the clamp is in place, that adds another 5in to the height (i.e., making it 22.3in), and 0.4in to the width (to make it 3.5in). The height options are key for those of you who have turntables with fixed lids — and there’s plenty of room to lift them, something Reliable specifically designed the UberLight Frame to accommodate. If your table also resides on a chunkier isolation base, that additional height might complicate things, however. My table’s lid is fully removable, so I had plenty of room at my disposal.

More background now directly from Reliable, in the official UberLight Frame YouTube clip seen above.

Setup & Light Testing
The UberLight Frame box cleared Customs and came to my doorstep relatively straightaway, as housed in a solid cardboard protective box. A personalized, handwritten note from Kahn was tucked inside the big white box within — a nice touch. On the back of that card, Reliable’s slogan — “Getting it right. For you.” — promised big and promised simple, and I’m happy to report that (spoiler alert!) the UberLight Frame did exactly that.

The UberLight Frame’s white box was pristine and clean, and it would likely remind you of the sturdy packaging a certain fruit-named phone/laptop/pad manufacturer uses for most, if not all, of its product lines. Each UberLight Frame element was easy to remove from their respective positions in the inner molded placeholder/slot. As I’m also concurrently in the midst of testing some new isolation tables and anti-vibration footers, my PerspeX turntable has been moved off its main perch and on/off a variety of alternate stabilizing surfaces more than usual of late, so I decided to go with the clampdown. I affixed the Frame clamp on the current perch just off to the right of the table itself, where it in no way interfered with the table’s performance or its stability. That said, having those other two options — base and table mount — on hand for potential future UberLight Frame repositioning once my table resumes its “normal” residence is most welcome.

To get things started, I deliberately knocked both my table’s tonearm counterweight and antiskating weight out of whack to see if the UberLight Frame would better assist me in the requisite readjustments once I leaned in to redial things back into place. After that self-induced weighting anomaly, Jesse Colin Young kept repeating the line, “You’re a flame that cannot last” on a skip/loop on the song “Fire in the Water” on his 1982 Elektra LP The Perfect Stranger (Side One, Track 4), something that hadn’t occurred during its previous and properly aligned spins. I tapped the UberLight Frame on, angled the light a few degrees toward the black tonearm counterweight downforce-scale adjustment dial, and tweaked away. I cued JCY’s “Fire” back up, and there were no further skip-hitches. (Speaking of the late, great Jesse Colin Young, you can read my lengthy vinyl-centric Q&A with him here.)

Before I cued up my next LP, I held down the Frame’s on/off button and the light dimmed and turned off. I cracked the seal on the limited-edition mint-green version of Steven Wilson’s new two-song 2025 LP The Overview on Fiction that I had pre-ordered from SDE and cued up Side B, which is further demarked as This Is Where It Ends. (Side A is alternately known as, naturally, This Is Where It Started.) Tapping the Frame back on, I watched that SW LP’s lovely green hue roll as it spun ever onward, and continued to observe it after I went back to my desk located just beyond my Eames sweet-spot listening chair to make a few notes in the draft of my review. I turned the Frame off with the remote, and, absent the light being on it, the mint green looked duller and less resonant. (The sound of The Overview LP remained impeccable, though, and that will be covered in a different review/story to come!)

I went back over to the table and turned it off for the next step. Angling the light back toward the inner groove of Side B, I was able to read the data etched in the green there much easier than I would via my typical, in-a-pinch methodology of holding LPs up at various angles underneath overhead 75W LED soft-white lightbulbs while squinting just enough to see what might be discernable there, which isn’t ideal. I slowly rotated the platter underneath the disc so The Overview LP moved clockwise as it sat atop my trusty Sublima Mat Chakra Limited platter mat. First, I could instantly discern the “BO27606-0Ʌ B2” matrix info, followed a little ways around by “7524568” after the next rotation, and then, in the third spot, I clearly read “MILES. ABBEY ROAD 1/2 SPEED. ROOM 30” — the latter of which tells us Miles Showell did the cutting, and where. (See it above for yourself.)

I then went back to another LP I had played just the other day — Santana’s Let the Guitar Play, his three-track, limited-edition 2023 RSD Black Friday 12in single on tie-dye vinyl single, on Candid — to see how plainly I could distinguish what was what in the runout. Sure enough, “CAN33391 SIDE A” was readily apparent, and just a few ticks beyond it was “J POWELL,” confirming that Jeff Powell was the one who had cut this lacquer. The three iterations of the titular song “Let the Guitar Play” sounded quite good too, for that matter, but that’s also for another story to come. (Incidentally, Side B had no runout info — just the tie-dye color and a reverse/mirror image of Side A’s label graphics, albeit sans any of tracklisting or copyright stats since this is a one-sided release.)

I turned off all other surrounding lights in the lab after I put on Bob Mould’s artist-preferred standard black vinyl version of his new 2025 Here We Go Crazy LP on Granary Music/BMG, and the way I had the Frame positioned over that record, it looked like Crazy was prone on an operating table (which is actually a compliment). With the Frame in position, I could better detect the grooves in between all five of Side B’s tracks for individual cueing, rather than deploying any educated-guesswork needle-drop action that would have surely taken place after I turned the Frame off via the remote. (Our resident moonlighting jazz DJ Ken Micallef would certainly approve of the Frame’s light-in-the-dark track-cueing option — and you can read all about his afterhours DJing adventures in a post-to-come early next week.)

I continued to access/play with the UberLight Frame at various angles, temp settings, and brightness settings. I put on a few yet-to-be-cleaned used LPs — not for any needle-drop listening here, mind you! — and observed various scuffs, grime, fingerprints, paper dust, and other iniquities that I wouldn’t have so instantly and noticeably seen otherwise.

I also angled the UberLight Frame to check if there was any additional dust that needed attending to on my gear, even though I’m fairly religious in cleaning my table and its surroundings. That said, I did spy some white dust dots accumulated near the bottom of the black tonearm base — perhaps they had only just taken up residence down there after all the spindling and unspindling of those uncleaned used LPs, I rationalized — and promptly whisked them all away. (You may also have spotted some dust et al in the two LP-on-table pics above that I snapped myself — which I purposely left in place as is for purposes of this review before any real playback took place.)

Conclusions
Finally, the SRP for the Reliable UberLight Frame (in either black or white finish) is $399. For comparison, Reliable’s various Flex models run either $79 or $129 (as of this posting). I imagine some of you may balk at the Frame’s SRP and consider opting for those lower-priced Flex options — which is certainly your prerogative — but the thing is, the UberLight Frame is much more flexible than the Flex and it offers more feature options that, the more you use them, the more you find you can’t live without them. As the song goes, it’s in the way that you use it, and I have clearly seen the light with the Reliable UberLight Frame showing me the way. Long may it shine.

Author bio: Mike Mettler is the editor of Analog Planet in addition to being the music editor of our sister site Sound & Vision, and he’s also a contributing music editor to one of our other sister sites, Stereophile, in addition to being a frequent Vinyl Icons scribe for Hi-Fi News. Plus, he’s quite partial to vintage 1967 Mustang fastbacks, but that’s a story for another time and place.

For more about Reliable, and/or to order an UberLight Frame direct from the manufacturer, go here.