Not all NOS tubes are expensive. And IME, with the few tube pieces I have, I’ve found that high priced NOS tubes don’t necessarily equate to best performance. As usual with audio gear: it depends. For example, I had an expensive pair of NOS tubes in my preamp which sounded great. I replaced my power amp and ended up having to replace my expensive NOS preamp tubes with inexpensive NOS tubes because they sounded far better (to me) with my new power amp. You simply cannot predict what will work best in your setup until you try it, so you cannot predict for certain that your future NOS tubes need to be expensive. Just my $.02.
How expensive are best NOS tubes ? And how difficult to find ?
Phono stages, preamps and power amps. Any non-Chinese adequate substitutes? I know that if you have Lamm, Vladimir has a few sets of Russian tubes in stock for each particular unit, and it is not really expensive to retube them. But if you have, say, VAC or CAT or Atma-Sphere and want best longest lasting and most reliable tubes, what then ? Don't ask me why not Chinese, I can't talk about it here except that I don't trust their quality control.
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- 63 posts total
- 63 posts total