TUBE ADVICE

Some tips for the novice

Do not doubt too much the quality of nowadays tubes , they are excellent
The NOS (new old stock) tubes are more of a gamble , sometimes much better
and sometimes worse , NOS WE300B is for instant the reference in 300B tubes
Well after comparing that reference with the cheapest Chinese version
We are very surprised , the chinese sounded better , better low end on first
impression , then after swapping some elder 1950's WE300B into the amp
finally more by nostalgic decision we decided that the WE300B had a slightly
better mid range , the testing was done on WE 91A SE amp , Smacks horns
driven with WE755 and JBL super tweeter and EMT 927 turntable and an
Ortofon tube Riaa preamp , with a Denon MC DL103
The Sovtek 300B is clearly inferior , has a lot of self resonance (every tube has)
and in my opinion avoid it . The new version is supposed to be better .
The WE production of today is not up to there old standard yet.
Krone tubes are really excellent , but not all and they have a bad reputation for of trying to sell defect tubes and had problems with theire filaments ( we never encountered that kind of problem ),we test them all ,and like them a lot (at least the std versions the exotic ones are not my cup of tea ) , thats why we distibute them . Today it seems that KR is in receivership , we still have stock , so while ,they sort out theire problems we continue selling these .
AVVT , svetlana & Cetron tubes are the best of the rest but still a hefty pricetag
JAN and others are a gamble for the more std tube types , Bugle boy and amperex are just names , no factory exists to my knowledge rumour is that brand name has been bought and tubes are being relabeled and resold but lots of brand names do that like , groove tubes , Elektro harmonix and Shark tubes and Ruby tubes and so many other names are just traders that buy Chinese or Russian tubes and rebrand them .
Chinese are cheap and excellent and Russian have far better reputation until that to will change .

The other tubes :

Sovtek distributes some excellent Russian made 12AX7 , EL84 ,5881
5U4 , and many others at very cheap prices
we carry lots of selected tubes from Russian production .
China makes lot's of excellent tubes , you can off course run into a bad lot
every now and then , but in recent years this has not happened too often
For example their 12AX7 is the best if you can still find some of their old
production .Yes they stopped .
Svetlana makes good tubes they have the best EL34 , 6550 ,6L6GC ect
and the prices are reasonable.
NOS WE are excellent , all old WE are excellent as most Mullards and Siemens
and Philips and many other brands .
The problem today is that some of my competitors rebrand tubes , so be carefull
Many of the NOS ECG philips brand are actually mnf by GEC and are quite good , we are currently testing some of them .
Once you have finished your amp, pre amp and you are actually
listening to it , and you got used to its sound , then eventually swap tubes
It may sound different , but therefore it's not better.

Copyright 2002
Benny Glass

info : email sales@diyparadiso.com