Amplifier Power tubes - important to sound?

     I went through a few octets of  Sylvania's 6550s, until Upscale ran out and I couldn't find any more.

      Uncle Kev recommended the Winged 'C' and those were a nice replacement, until the plant burned.

       The GE 6550 variants were my next stop and I loved 'em, until they got too salty for my wallet.

        I kept a good testing quad, that I've used for comparison against a few other brands and found the Russian Gold Lion KT88s to provide fairly close to the same presentation.

                                    Roll on and happy listening!

Just to be clear, I was certainly not recommending anything other than the correct tube type for the OP’s amplifier. I was simply pointing out that the quality of the output tubes can make a difference, in terms of both power output and the amount of distortion they produce.

Curious, I read herein that the feedback level related to the amplifier is important to consider for purposes of evaluating whether it really makes much of a difference to tube roll power tubes. Anyone know why that would be?

Further, I am biamping with mc 901 monos and since the solid state part of it handles the bass drivers maybe power tubes are not that important since it appears it impacts the bass area more so.

But since I love spending so much money on everything audio even the slightest change might be worth considering. Maybe power tubes would impact the mid driver.

There are some people posting herein who know a hell of a lot about tubes. It’s actually kind of scary.

I have quite a collection of KT88s. For my system the KR KT88 sounds best. Mainly the tone and balance top to bottom being accurate. 

roxy54

7,903 posts

08-13-2024 at 12:17am 

@emergingsoul

It’s so strange. I want to believe that your just putting us on

”your”?  “your”??

OMG @roxy54: are you OK?

Do we need a new grammar nazi???