Tube advice

Do you use them simultaneously in different systems?  It may be a worthwhile experiment to have ARC retube one amp, and retube the other with tube depot.

I have a VT100 mk II. When I bought it, the tubes were going bad. I tried to retube part of the tube compliment piecemeal via tube depot.  I got frustrated because of bad luck and inexperience, and eventually had ARC retube it and replace a few of the other internal components as well (an advantage of sending to the factory is that they can check the whole unit, beyond the tubes).

Not sure if I won't try tube depot again when it comes time to retube, but for what it's worth, I haven't had any problems with the tubes ARC supplied at all!

Nothing wrong with tubes from Tube Depot. Pay for matched sets. The trick is knowing how to bias an ARC amp, especially the VT series. You have to bias your amp(s) and you should be doing this often as they will shift as the tubes age. Before you temp to bias your amps be sure you know what you are doing or you'll have big problems. You might want to post this on the amps preamps forum. What ARC amps do you own? Do your research on how to bias your amps. If you post what models you have I'm sure many ARC users will help you out. If you're going to own several tube amps you should invest in a tube tester. There are plenty of junk tube testers out there so do your research and find one that's been gone through and calibrated. Good luck

Not sure about the newer ones, but I would stick with ARC's tubes if the newer amps are anything like the older ones.  They were very hard to bias correctly and tubes often would fail on first use because of that.  Andy Bouwman told me years ago that he couldn't guarantee any tubes he sold if they were being used in ARC amps, for that reason.  Personally, I'd stick with ARC's tubes, unless the biasing is easier nowadays. 

adg101 - intersting, so it is possible for my ARC installed tubes in my vt100 mk II to fall out of proper bias over time?  

In the old, old days, the amplifiers designed by William Zane Johnson, founder of ARC, were well known to run the tubes very hard, and failures were common.  To deal with this issue, ARC was known in those days to "update" their amplifiers quite frequently.  I never knew whether they were trying to convince customers that the newest version of whatever amplifier was "fixed" or what they were really doing.  But tube failure, sometimes catastrophic, was a price you paid for great sound. In any case, Mr. Johnson has long been out of the ARC design picture, and I have not heard in many years that modern ARC amplifiers were particularly unreliable.  If you know what you are doing with bias adjustments, you could source the tubes from Tube Depot, or one step up the scale would be to buy selected tubes from Kevin Deal or Jim McShane, which might cost a bit more but those guys really do test the tubes before selling them.  Even the latter sources might be less expensive than buying tubes from ARC.  Then you can start at bias point where the plate dissipation is at first low-ish and let the tubes break in for several hours before turning up the current, if indeed the tubes are stressed in modern ARC designs. But Tube Depot is a reputable source, far more reliable than eBay might be, for example. Keep in mind that tubes age and change parameters over time, no matter who sold them to you.  So, long term, there are no guarantees regardless of source.

Yes, marktomaras, ALL tubes will require re-biasing once in a  while over time.