About 3 years into my uke journey, I decided that I could get a better quality uke. My first attempt at this was a Kanile'a Super Tenor, which I liked, but I did not really connect with it, which was somewhat frustrating.
I decided to go to a shop where I could play a bunch of high end ukes and compare. I went through half a dozen, and nothing really set my soul on fire. Then I saw a couple of beautiful Koa ukes behing the counter and asked to play one. They were Collings, and it was love at first strum. A couple of months later, through a series of amazing coincidences, I ended up getting a used UT2-K (I think that's the model number)
It is a thing of beauty, in appearance, tone and playability. I have since gotten other high end ukes, but keep the Collings, which has a great tone, IMHO, for re-entrant tuning.