Tubes and their problems

We all have problems. Tubes have their fair share. They must be good though or else nobody in their right mind would tolerate them. Same goes for records.

One of my problems is I wish I had fewer tubes and records. But I want things to sound really good and never know when I might want to play a record. That's another problem I have.

Problems, problems....

With my tubes I find they tend to get noisy over time. I have never had one just suddenly go up. Currently I have them in my ARC pre-amp only. No tube power amps. That's really asking for trouble. :^)

On the bright side (no pun) tubes tend to glow and look really cool, especially in the dark. Transistors can't do that. If they do you have real problems. Plus some vendors have even found ways to make the tubes look like they glow even more than they do. Now that's good marketing!

+1 Mapman.
Tubes are great when they work well, and a real PITA when they don't.
Luckily, they seem to work well most of the time.

@Bifwynn, we don't have a recommended set of hours on the tubes we use. FWIW power triodes are often good for about 10,000 hours owing to their simplicity. Octal base signal triodes can often do that as well.

We've been warranting our tubes for a year for some 3 decades now and getting away with it, so they must last a good long while.

Solid states usually don't have tube problems. The blown transistors happen far more rare than tubes and not too difficult to replace.

@Ralph -- any idea why ARC recommends that its power tubes be replaced every 2000 hours (6550s and KT-120s); 3000+ hours in case of KT-150s. I'm sure you know that KT-150s ain't cheap. My amp uses 8 KT-150s. Yikes!!

Not sure this is relevant, or that I am framing the point properly, but KT-150s are rated to have 70 watts of plate dissipation capability; ARC drives them to about 27 watts.

Does that permit the inference that ARC is not driving their power tubes all that hard and that tube life expectancy should be longer?

Sorry for not framing my question in a technically correct way. But I assume you know what I mean.

Could you put a little more gloss on why your power amp tubes last so long??

BIF