How expensive are best NOS tubes ? And how difficult to find ?


Phono stages, preamps and power amps. Any non-Chinese adequate substitutes? I know that if you have Lamm, Vladimir has a few sets of Russian tubes in stock for each particular unit, and it is not really expensive to retube them. But if you have, say, VAC or CAT or Atma-Sphere and want best longest lasting and most reliable tubes, what then ? Don't ask me why not Chinese, I can't talk about it here except that I don't trust their quality control.
inna
Not every stage in a preamp or amp needs NOS tubes. There are phase splitters and cathode-followers which have less sonic affect on the circuit. New production tubes are cheap and also sound good as power tubes. There are some really good quality Russian tubes now, and I believe they will continue to get better sonically.

Some of the high quality Chinese tubes cost as much as some NOS. If given the choice, I would buy NOS from a trusted dealer.
It's true that as availability of NOS tubes goes down, prices do go up. And the supply of true "New In Box" old stock is diminishing, but there is still a great supply of NOS tubes that are removed from electronic gear from military, medical, industrial sources. Although they are not really new, they have either minimal or zero hours of use, and will test as new.
That's why anybody who's into high-end tube gear needs to own a tube tester to check their purchases and their personal stash.
Your question is too general to give a specific answer other than to say that price is a function of supply and demand.  Just look at vintage Western Electric 300B, United 845 as examples.
In the link on Brent's site, click a tube that interests you and you will see his detailed descriptions on the history, country of origin and sound characteristics of all the different tubes used in the industry today. It is very useful info and his offerings are top notch.
http://www.audiotubes.com/
Not all NOS tubes are expensive. And IME, with the few tube pieces I have, I’ve found that high priced NOS tubes don’t necessarily equate to best performance. As usual with audio gear: it depends. For example, I had an expensive pair of NOS tubes in my preamp which sounded great. I replaced my power amp and ended up having to replace my expensive NOS preamp tubes with inexpensive NOS tubes because they sounded far better (to me) with my new power amp. You simply cannot predict what will work best in your setup until you try it, so you cannot predict for certain that your future NOS tubes need to be expensive. Just my $.02.