Favorite 300B: Sophia vs KR

“flock of crows"
I believe that’s supposed to be "murder of crows"

Murder of Crows- great flick!

I wrote Jeff, who is a very nice gentleman by the way, my thoughts, after I read his. His response was more than enough for me to get extra prove that tubes perform not equally in differ amps. His system is out of my range and simply great, but I do own Tannoy's as well and drive them by Cary CAD 300sei with AVVT's and KR's, where all of them have their own tonality and presentation, but all sounds fantastic in the musical and balance way. There are 3 huge complains about RP that I have:

1. Their top end sounds to metallic
2. Their low end is to prominent and sound more as midbass than deep bass
3. Their mids are flat and even shouting in some situations to my taste, some may call neutral?, but midbass try to cover that issue, however without big success

I have had almost the same issue with their Princess line, where mids were really good, but top end also had metallic tone and low end was to boomy.

Already said enough about their MSRP and will leave this alone.

On the positive note, there are folks I know personally, who loved them. One good friend of my running them in his beautiful Zanden 7000 and sold WE re-issue after all, so, for each is his own and that's a fact. Unfortunately, I didn’t have the opportunity to hear them in his system yet, but we are planning something in May, so, I will try to come back with extra info after that.

@Charles1dad

Will be very interesting to read your impressions, but because you love BT's, which I didn't like in my Cary as well, I do expect you to like RP even more and if I have to choose from two, RP will be the one, but then again, based on my own system only.

THX

Maxmad,
Thanks very much for your input. Our 300b amplifiers do differ and I have no doubts that is a significant factor in the sucess of one tube vs another. Couple that with different system components and it`s no wonder why there`s no universal'best' 300b or anything else for that matter.

I`ll get the RP tomorrow if UPS cooperates.

I have a pair of these http://app.audiogon.com/listings/456096

It's really pity that the seller didn't follow the advice of Jac from jacmusic, who clearly describes about AVVT tubes. They need to be treated with kind of wake up procedure, before you use them after years of storage and that's not possible at home, so, you need to send them to Jac for that. Some tubes even show really poor test results before treatment and become normal after, really strange and exciting that tubes can do that.
Not sure about issue he describes, whatever it have something to do with their long term of not been used, is beyond me and you can better ask Jac about that one, but the price is good, however Jac still have them in stock for EUR500=USD650 a pair plus shipping and even with that price they are worth every penny, imo.

One that I really like to try is EML 300XLS, which, according to some, give AVVT's a bit of the hard time, hmm, that’s why they got and still have my attention. They don't have that "problem" that for example KR 300XLS have, not perform at their best if used in normal 300B amps. EML's perform identically good in both amplifications, while KR's shining in steroids amps only.
And, there is always EAT, that I strongly believe are simply re-issue of AVVT 300B's. Not sure how they managed that, but I am kind of glad they did.