Why are people paying these stupid tube prices?

You "just ordered a set of 4 KT150 power tubes for $139.00 each..."  !!!!

I think you can answer your question very well yourself.

I asked myself the same question 20+ years ago.  My answer, "you're out of your mind.  It's not going to get better.".  Today I have solid state.  I have been fighting off the urge to go "Tube" again.   Thank you for bringing me back to my senses.

It was sarcasm,  but if you visit any headphone site you will see people rolling precious nos into chi fi amps.....

Yes, it is a prevalent pattern to see folks rolling rare vintage tubes into cheap chi-fi or even cheap Schiit amps, especially headphone gear. Especially 6SN7 and 6922. It always rubbed me the wrong way too. What a waste. On the upside you can buy their tubes after they move onto the next flavor of them month, but a lot of times it will only be a single.

Anyways, the current tube shortage / price crisis really mainly affects power tubes, which don’t have vintage alternatives available in quantity.

Same thing happened to whale oil when it got scarce:

Over a span of 35 years which embraced the Civil War, whale oil ranged from 30 1/2¢ per gallon to $1.92 according to the following prices which are taken from Eaton's book, "Petroleum", 1866:

Another source mentions that the average price from 1845 to 1855 was $1.77 per gallon (Stotz, 1938).

In the war year 1864, the price per 35 gallon barrel was $67.20.  It is not known if this is sperm whale oil or oil from any species.

Sperm whale oil commanded a higher price just like better tubes.
If it's not one thing, it's another.

All the best,
Nonoise
 

facten

2,141 posts

05-25-2022 at 08:45am

TubeDepot isn’t presently selling the TS KT150 - look at the specific page

 

I may be wrong but I don’t think Psvane or Linlai make KT150s

The New Sensor factory owned by fuzz-pedal inventor and marketer extraordinaire Mike Matthews is the only manufacturer, under the Tung Sol label, of KT 150’s. So no, you are not wrong. 

@oddiofyl 

"Maybe if people didn’t buy $200 headphone amps and burn up rare tubes for mediocre sound we wouldn’t have this problem"

I believe Marie Antoinette was of the same opinion when she said...... 

"Let them eat cake."

This sort of arrogant elitism is why many people are disgusted by

audiophiles.

Time for a reality check, buddy. The rest of the world isn't here to serve you.

@mulveling 

"Yes, it is a prevalent pattern to get to see folks rolling rare vintage tubes into cheap chi-fi or even cheap Schiit amps, especially headphone gear. ....... On the upside you can buy their tubes after they move onto the next flavor of them month."

Perhaps it would be best if we just prevented anyone that wasn't part of your elite group from purchasing any tubes at all. That way, the people that deserve all the best in life, like YOU, will keep the best things in life for yourselves.

oddiofyl 

"Maybe if people didn’t buy $200 headphone amps and burn up rare tubes for mediocre sound we wouldn’t have this problem"

I believe Marie Antoinette was of the same opinion when she said...... 

"Let them eat cake."

This sort of arrogant elitism is why many people are disgusted by

audiophiles.

Time for a reality check, buddy. The rest of the world isn't here to serve you.

I am 100 % a Blue Collar guy.    You don’t know me at all,  I am 100% correct in what I say about the absolute waste of rare NOS tubes in complete junk.  You are the same douche that buys that piece of crap and whines about how it sounds like crap with NOS this or that.  Give me a break 

  Prices are crazy on everything. Diesel $6.40 gal, 5.56 ammo $500 per thousand. You guys outta try feeding class III guns 😆. Maybe I should bitch about all the wanna be’s that have those cheap AR clones. The butt hurt factor is alive and well on AGON. Oh yeah I’m blue collar too. Just spent last weekend watching drag races in an ag field in central Ca. My problem is I dabble in too many things with too little money. So I guess we all suffer First World problems. I have to remember Rule 62 “ Don’t take yourself so damn seriously “. Regards, Mike B. 

Perhaps it would be best if we just prevented anyone that wasn’t part of your elite group from purchasing any tubes at all. That way, the people that deserve all the best in life, like YOU, will keep the best things in life for yourselves.

I knew this would rattle the sensitive ones looking for a fight and hyperbolic analogies to Marie Antionette (rolls eyes). I could equally state that guys like you who habitually drag these conversations to the mat are what gives the audiophile community a bad rap. Nowhere did I say it wasn’t anyone’s right to stick round plate 6SN7 or pinched waist 6922 into a Chi-fi amp. They’re not excommunicated from audiophile-dom if they do this. Just stated my opinion (backing the other guy who said it first) that there are better uses for these dwindling resources.

My Schiit Saga with the 6SN7 tube buffer will embarrass a lot of high price preamps. Yes. Bettered my ARC SP6B, no slouch. This stuff is really good. No waste of tubes.

@mulveling  it is a prevalent pattern to see folks rolling rare vintage tubes into cheap chi-fi or even cheap Schiit amps, especially headphone gear. Especially 6SN7 and 6922. It always rubbed me the wrong way too. What a waste.

Quite so. In economics an analogy has long been called "tragedy of the commons".  A slightly edited quote from Wiki -

a situation in which individual users, who have open access to a resource unhampered by shared social structures or formal rules that govern access and use,^[act independently according to their own self interest and, contrary to the common good of all users, cause depletion of the resource through their uncoordinated action.

The value of the tubes to the community is much higher than the prices they are being traded at privately.

Starting to feel like there’s a "go green" agenda or something! 😉  Politician: "Just go out and buy a digital/solid state amp."

Wow, I own a DS2 preamp, a Levinson 27.5 amp, and I own Schiit headphone amps, one has Siemens tubes, the other a E-6SN7, with good Focal headphones these cheap Schiit amps are pretty formidable in sound quality. The E-6SN7 tubed amp is the best, but these are not NOS. The Siemens amp is collecting dust, and the tube was before I bought the amp. I have a lot of old tubes, 12A?7s, 6DJ8s, 6SN7s, and more collecting dust. I have probably listened to all of them for at least a short time, so I can't sell them as NOS, other than a few Chinese 6SN7 and Russian KT88, and various 300Bs, so I must be the worst of the worst, listening to alleged NOS tubes, and making them slightly used just to determine how they sound, and them sitting on them. I also have a home made KT88 amp I haven't even plugged in...

Once a week I get the Audiowaygone update. Today this caught my eye and caused quite a bit of amusement. So people who are accustomed to bragging rights prices and 60k audio cables are now complaining about high prices. IF you idiots had not paid these prices to begin with and act like money is no problem you would have found the scalpers would not have shown up to begin with. Stick your hand out flat on the table, hit it with the hammer again and tell me it still hurts when you do so.  You can't teach the unteachable.

There is a Darkstar amp for sale local to me….  Comes with hundreds of dollars worth of “NOS” tubes …. $350

Makes no sense to use unobtainium holy grail tubes in stuff like like that ….not being snobby, just practical.   

Viva tubes are the only ones that I see who are out of line and I would bet they aren't selling any.  Surely no one has lost their mind and are paying $350 for a KT 150.  

I have purchased from Viva in the past but will not forget their strategy here and will never shop there again.

I’ll never buy from Viva….not that they even care 

I have been using Viva tubes for the last three years, purchased about 20 small tubes from them in that time, all were priced well with good long term reliability in the pieces of gear they were purchased for, haven't looked but have all their prices skyrocketed like the KT150s?

I guess nobody else has noticed the tube MANUFACTURER, New Sensor / EH, is setting even higher prices than Viva tubes on their own web store. But I guess it’s just fun to bash Viva tubes for some reason? They’re doing you a favor, if you really need (not for spares or OCD) a power tube that’s out of stock elsewhere. They had to price high enough to discourage hoarders and scalpers.

The big power tubes is where the crunch is, because there’s no vintage alternatives to fill the void. The vintage small tubes should still last for many years. It’s bad to need KT120 or KT150 right now, with Gold Lion KT88 close behind. KT170 is also bad to need, but at least there aren't a lot of amps out there that use it.

I ran Jadus tube gear for years,in the 90s it cost more than a grand to retube a defy7....solid state has come so far in the past decade ie..Boulder,Constellation, Dartzel, Pass labs etc there is no reason to mess with tube amps anymore imo

We should have some empathy for poor musicians. They have their Marshall stacks getting bounced around in a van every night.

I can't believe it, but I just paid $300 for a pair of 1950's NOS RCA Black  plate 12AX7 and $150 for 1950's 12AU7 ......    Unobtanium and worth it.   

@oddiofyl : back in 2016 I bought four RCA 6L6GC black plate tubes taken from my friend's Fender amp. $300 - and worth it!

That's right. ....they don't make em anymore.    I have purchased from this seller before and tubes were time capsule condition