Favorite 300B: Sophia vs KR

Maxmad,
Well how are the Sophia Royals compared to others you`ve used?

I compared them to AVVT 32BL and AVVT 300B C37, where both of them are simply superior to Sophia's.

Sophia's do not sound natural to me, they have to metallic tone on top and to upfront midbass, they are simply not balanced enough, which is totally not acceptable in that price range, imo. Also they are not airy enough and goes not further than 2D kind of picture, while AVVT's are totally 3D with everything in the place: deep bass, smooth mids and lovely top end, where detail aren't forced, like at Sophia's. It seemst that Sophia's tell you how the music must sounds like and not just let you enjoy it, especially with complex things, they just don’t keep up the level.
These tubes are USD 500-600 range, sound and quality wise, but even then, I wouldn't buy them.
Their metallic tone was in their "Mesh" model I owned in the past as well, sold it pretty fast.
If these tubes were the only 300B's on planet, I will be changing my amp fast.
They had around 100 hours on them, if somebody interesting.

It may sound to negative, but I simply don't accept any faults anymore, especially for such money.

Which tube is better for you really depends upon the amp itself, and the extent to which you need specific voicing to compensate a sonic anomaly elsewhere in the system, or for tuning to your preferences. I'll go further in saying that even a given amp can be altered to completely change your perception of relative ranking of tubes.

For example, I have a stash of KR Audio 300B, Sophia perforated plate 300B and Sophia Princess 300B. I also have Vaic VV32BL, Emission Labs, Shuguang and others. While I did find the Sophia 300B to have a lot of top end "spray" and euphonic bass bloat, and preferred the stiffer, more revealing and dynamic sound of the KRs, a change to my 300B monoblocks also changed this preference.

I had my Audion Golden Dream PSET 300B monoblocks recapped by Bob Hovland (highly recommended). There was a small issue I needed diagnosed and took the amps to Bob. That issue was inconsequential but while he had the amps open I asked him to give me an opinion about whether he thought the power supply caps were worth keeping or replacing, given that the amps are a decade old and used heavily. Bob came back to me saying first that he is reluctant to change caps when an amp is already exceptional, and those Golden Dreams are truly outstanding. But he did believe that if I was willing to take some risk, a recap with Nichicon skinny cans would improve dynamics, definition and transparency further without degrading the tone density those high silver-content amps already offer.

He was right. The Golden Dreams came back better in all respects after the recap. I was curious enough, however, to run my 300B tube rankings again. The Audions recapped with Nichicons, the Sophia mesh plates lost their bass bloat and the aerosol top end lost the glitter and gloss to settle back to a natural frequency extension with even finer definition, while all of the midrange tone density was left intact. Bass is deep, tight and comparatively lean. Spatial dimensioning is convincing and scales appropriately to the music.

The Sophia mesh plates sounded beautiful in my Softone office amp but thick and syrupy in the stock Audion Golden Dreams, which is not remotely a quality of that amp. Meanwhile the KR Audio 300B sounded hard and spatially flat in the Softone but energetic, clean, lean and toneful in the Golden Dreams. After the Audion recap, The Sophia mesh plate is the more dynamically assertive tube with bass cleaner than the KR. The KR 300B now has a comparatively pinched soundstage width and it is dimensionally flatter than the Sophia.

There are a lot of factors in play on resolving this question. If you don't like a given tube, it may not be that there's anything generalizable that's deficient about the given tube. It may be that the tube just isn't a good match to your amp, as it came voiced from the factory.

Phil

Maxmad,
Thanks for your impressions of the Sophia tube. I`ve been completely happy with the Shuguang Treasure 300b for almost 2 years(sound quality and reliability). I`m however curious to hear an AVVT tube in my amplifier for comparision. Where are they available? Are they similar to the EML 300b tube?
Best Regards,

Dear Phil ( 213cobra ),

Many thanks for your post and even agree with it, I still having doubts about the price v.s. performance of Sophia's.

A good friend of my uses Royal's in his Zanden 7000 and after he tried AVVT C37, he started to hear all these things I have been describing more clearly.

Sophia "Mesh" been described, at least by many Cary CAD 300sei users, as match made in heaven. It took me not that long to realize that it’s not.

This is not the coincidence that Treasures, for example, didn’t do it for me either, Royal's are for sure better, but not vs. AVVT's and KR's. My KR's are tubular type, not in production anymore and have pretty much identical inside construction as AVVT 32BL, but in much smaller glass. Going to give them more listening time, KR's I mean, because they just stay in box after C37 arrived.

The easier way to describe my feelings is when Royal's are installed, I listen to Royal's, and when AVVT's, I listen to music.

There is another player in town, Takatsuki TA 300B, made in Japan with huge influence of Air Tight, here is the link where you can read some impressions

http://robertmusic.blogspot.com/2011/07/heads-up-coming-very-soon-takatsuke-ta.html

I don’t have anything to do with these guys and don’t know more than you, after you read the post from the link, but he seems to have the best 300B's around and even he didn’t compare them to everything he owns yet, but so far, he is very impressed with these Japanese...

THX