Rays Tubes

Just found this discussion. I have a Mac MA352 I’ve been waiting for them to finish building and have read at least one person here with a big improvement replacing stock 12AT7 & 12AX7 with PSVANEs. Chinese tubes on Amazon at $50/pair, matched. They look a lot like the Ray Tubes which are 4-5x that. Anyone know anything about this, and I’d also like to know where Macintosh gets their rebranded tubes.

My Atmasphere monoblocks originally used 12AT7s as input tubes, which means they were responsible for most of the voltage gain across the whole circuit. At that time, I purchased a wide variety of different brands of 12AT7, to determine which sounded the best. The first finding is that it made a considerable difference; different 12AT7s sounded different. The surprising finding is that a Chinese variant sounded the best.  In those days, there was a tube vendor operating in the UK called "Billington". Their top of the line 12AT7 was called "Billington Gold", made in China.  I compared it to Mullard, GE, Sylvania, and some other NOS types. Billington Gold were the best sounding by far. The bad news is that they had a short life span in the amplifier circuit.  This saga played out in the late 90s or early 2000s. I think Billington the vendor is no more.

Whoops! I just googled Billington out of my own curiosity.  To my surprise, the business is still in operation. I don't know whether their Chinese made 12AT7 (which went by another alphanumeric designation, as I recall) is still available.