YOU ROCK Audiotubes and now, so can we. On behalf of all who are interested thanks very much for for "de myth tifying" some of the basics. via an excellent tutorial. Love Always Beatlewayne.
"N.O.S" is an acronym that stands for "New Old Stock," meaning, left over stock that was never purchased. It does not mean 'vintage.' Why do people call vintage tubes "N.O.S." whether they are new old stock or not? It's deceptive when it comes to purchasing vintage tubes, and you may actually be looking for a genuine N.O.S. tube.
Correction the rarest Tung-Sol 6550 is black plate no holes with three D getters two on one side, one D getter on top from 1959 and older. They sound extremely balanced through out all freq’s, very robust, smooth, airy with outstanding imaging.
Yes, I will have to do that! :) Well when run in an audio-amp and at moderate volumes even e.g. the middy EL34 amplifies with a linear response, so the difference will be even less amongst valves of the same or similar type. At higher levels, with the increase of harmonic distortion, any muddines, thinnes or harshnes will be more noticable and with that the valve will reveal its nature more.
Hi, stay tuned, more to come when I can find the time. I was a radio disc jockey years ago and I guess the voice stayed with me. I am from the Chicago suburbs, but I guess the radio voice accent is more like California!!
You may have missunderstood me. I was talking about the pre-amp valves of your amp. But that we can leave for the time being. You're right about the price of original KTs not being in level with the quality of them, though. Demand and availability, you know... The hype for the originals is way larger than the difference in tone.
Sounds like you got a tone-sucker somewhere in your signal chain, mate. :) What kind of amp and did you bring the valves to breakup at all? The Sovtek isn't even a KT electrically, from what I know, so the diff should be quite obvios. You could be right in that your pre-amps are overshadowing your output-bottles though. Which pre-amps do you got in there?
Oh, but they do when they start working "properly" - i.e. beyond their design ratings. Early designs, such as triodes, pentodes and the first beam tetrodes tend to compress rather nicely and create a wheezing distortion. KTs and powerfull beam tetrodes have usually harder clipping characteristics. Even at ultra-linear e.g. a 6L6G will have a very sweet highend and a full bottom end - hence not so linear after all.
Russian tubes are generally louder but thinner in sound. The British are just the opposite, warm and rich. The USA 6CA7 are in between, with great power and nice music reporduction.
i have what i THINK may be an NOS tung-sol three hole, however on the side just on the metal section below the glass housing, it has in big bold ink printed 3D letters CEI not IEC it has the same stop sign on top with 6550 mostly faded, and warn off. it came out of a mid 70's holden/wasp amplifier. any ideas?
i have some old gec kt88 that all work apart form one , it has not leaked but everything in the inside are tilted to the side at a big angle and when it is turned on it ribrates, have not used it for very long atal apart from powering up as do not want to damedge my leak tl50 plus, anyone got any ideas about this fault
i bought an old new zealand made amp from the 70's a little while back, i believe its still got its original tubes, my main issue is trying to ID them. its a coke bottle design with IEC (in dark blue 3D block letters.... from memory) printed on the metal, brown mica wafer and all 3 shiny getters, with the stop sign 6550 on top. If i recall correctly, its a tri hole. now there are no other numbers i can recall. Any ideas? Is there an email address i should use to send images to for better ID?
You're not entirely correct in assuming the big brands all are rebranded but are infact designs usually unique to the brand for which they were made. The GEC of today e.g., made in Saratov for New Sensor, is an attempt at true RI - but then only cheese from Cheshire is Cheshire cheese...
