Elrog 300B vs Takatsuki 300B tubes

I tried that email several days ago but no response. Do you know if they're still in business?

Got a little excited and didn't read your last sentence. I'm not getting my hopes up with the Amtrans guys.

Charles1dad, did you end up paying import duty fee on the Takatsukis? If so, how much?

Dracule1,
That purchase was 4 1/2 years ago and don't recall any import duty(it may have been factored in the cost I paided). The tubes were much less buying from them than Axiss who was the American importer at that time.
Charles,

I bought my Takatsuki pair from pricejapan. Their price after fees is actually the same as the price + fees quoted from amtrans. However, amtrans won't accept paypal payment and I really don't want to wait in the banks to wire transfer and thus I bought them from pricejapan. Anyhow, the price has increased by 10% since I bought them and the wait time has been much longer.

Too bad I cannot and may never be able to do a Taka vs Elrog comparison - my Elrog pairs died on my Lampizator Big 7 and they were sent back long ago. But I do prefer Taka a lot to EML 300B XLS on Frankenstein. Maybe a tiny bitter worse than EML for big scale but everything else better.

I am now settled with Taka but I do hope that Elrog could fix their reliability issue. They were top 300B tubes for sure.

By the way, the Takatsuki 274B is also great but also expensive (priced close to vintage WE27B NOS).