Hi All,
my name is Thomas Mayer and I am the founder and owner of Deutsche Elektronenröhren Manufaktur GmbH, which produces the Elrog tubes now. I’d like to share some more insight into the situation. Before I bought the machines of Elrog and started to produce tubes I was a distributor of Elrog tubes and I used them in amps I sell. I went through the same pain as other distributors with the failure of the 300Bs during the first year. Like George Lenz I made sure that each customer who experienced failed tubes either got replacements or his money back.
The company is under my sole management and I handle all customer interaction. You can rest assured that we will honour all warranty claims. In fact we are giving warranty on tubes produced by the old company as long as they are still in their original warranty period. Also be sure that if similar problems pop up again, there will be no denial.
I fully understand the reservations some of you have against Elrgo tubes after all you went through. It will take time until the reputation will return and I understand that people want to see others use the tubes for some significant time without reports of problems. We are prepared to go through this period. In fact the sales of the newly produced tubes has been quite good and we had trouble to keep up with the demand.
About the issues of the tubes. As has been reported, the tubes underwent numerous changes during last year. The most significant one was introduced in January this year, which involved a strengthening of the filaments. 95% of the failures were breaking of one or several of the filament segments. The filaments were very sensitive to overheating and especially inrush current at amplifier turn on.
The filament had been strengthened in January which was well before I bought the assets of the company. I am happy to report that I did not receive a single returned 300B tube which has that change. Also since the tubes are produced under the new company we did not experience a single 300b fault. In the new company we introduced several more changes, like different bases, better, more uniformly shaped glass and improved vacuum. Also much more improved quality control. Although the failure rate of the 300B is 0 so far of course it is unrealistic to expect absolutely 0 returns. A technical device can fail and at some point we will also see some failed 300b. But the experience so far indicates that the percentage will be very low and of course every fail will be handled under warranty. We continue the policy that every customer who experiences a fail has the choice of getting new tubes (with new warranty) or money back.
To show the confidence in the new tubes we extended the warranty from the previous 6 month to 1 year. Warranty will be handled graciously and we will not be fussy about tubes which fail shortly after the warranty expired.
Some more info about the problems of the 2015 tubes: There had been amps in which the failure rate was 100% and amps in which the failure rate even of the early tubes was negligible. For example I have customers who use amps built by me and are still running Elrog 300bs produced in March 2015. The amp with the highest failure rate was the Frankenstein. Before releasing the tubes for the Frank I asked a beta tester to use the tubes in his Frank. This test has been going on for almost 6 month now and the tubes are going strong. Of course a longer time is needed to have statistical relevant data. But we are willing to supply tubes for Franks again and would be thankful for early customers to provide feedback. We are also supplying Lampizator DACs with tubes and they are running fine. No problems whatsoever reported from Lampizator users so far. We do have a list of certain amps which we do not recommend to use with Elrog tubes, but these are known to eat other 300B brands as well. When inquiring for Elrog tubes mentioned your amp and we will tell you if it is on the black list. This black list is very very short and wr do not want to mention the manufacturer publicly.
I was in close contact with George Lenz before I started the new company and he was the first distributor on bard after restart of production. George continues to be the exclusive distributor for Elrog tubes in the US and Canada. I am happy to have such an experienced and customer oriented in George to take care of this area.
I hope this gives some more insight. Don’t hesitate to email me or George if you have further questions
Best regards
Thomas
