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Old tubes vs New tubes

My Melody I880 integrated has been running the same set of KT88's for several years now. Lately they started going soft, getting noisy, sometimes kind of a white noise, sometimes kind of a pffft sound, different levels, at idle never during play. Okay well they are shot.
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Trigger warning: Tube amp voltage is lethal. Lethal means you could be killed. Seriously. Electricity is really really scary lethal. Heat too. Skin grafts hurt a lot. The following information is of a graphic nature. Do not continue if you are easily disturbed.
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The tubes are really hot from music so I go out and get a cotton towel to change em out. There's an old set I keep around just in case. Lotta hours on these as well but curious to see how they compare I plug em in. Right away, faster than I can change a side anyway, there's this electric zapping sound and I look and see this really cool Tesla coil blue-white mad scientist electrical storm going on inside one of the tubes. Cool as it is I figure this is probably one of those times when less is more. Off goes the amp and off goes me looking for another set.

Ahh, here we go. Brand new (probably) Svetlana KT-88s. Plug em in. Power on. No zapping. No smoke. Okay. Back to Brother's in Arms, Side 3 of the MoFi 45 set.

Right away it seems like nothing has changed, no wait, it is a little more open and extended, little more detailed. The longer I listen though, its like someone's in there turning this great big knob slowly, ever so slowly, up and up and up. And this Gnome, he's got this control panel chock full of knobs- Bass, Midrange, Treble, Imaging, Palpable Presence, Detail, Dynamics, Punch, Slam, on and on, and he starts out scrambling like mad between them but then after a while he gives up and starts straining away slowly turning this one monster knob labeled EVERYTHING!

I love this guy! Within a few minutes its obvious the bass is more extended and a whole lot tighter. The highs are crystal clear, airy and free of mist. The whole presentation is so freakishly dynamic I can hardly believe it. There's a wood block, at least I think its a wood block, but every time he hits it it makes this CRACK! that is so powerfully there you feel it in your chest. I feel it in my skull! Which itself is impressive considering how thick my skull is! There's a bass line that's so articulately and precisely delineated its like you can tell the guy had his manicure at Gene Juarez and not the cheap Korean place. Knopfler is palpably present like never before, he just had a sip of Evian and not the sparking one either and yeah I know BIA is maybe the best MoFi of all time SQ wise but come on! 

Few minutes later I walk out and try and tell the wife about the blue-arcTesla tube. But she cuts me off. "What was that last? It sounded like a concert. It was BETTER than a concert! What did you do?"

People strain to hear differences between tubes. My wife heard this through the listening rooms closed solid core weather-stripped door. Before it sounded like a tube amp. Now it sounds..... amazing.




 




128x128millercarbon
millercarbon's avatar
millercarbon OP
12,531 posts
 
New matched set of TubeStore Preferred Series KT88s went in last night. TubeStore labels each tube with their matching number. When ordering I let them know my current set is 33, and so the ones they sent are 33. Sweet!

Bias hasn’t been checked in a while, and still hasn’t. Living the life! Caution to the wind! Blue spark! What?!? One of the new tubes went spffft (literally, I ran it through Goolag spel chek) and lit up with the same Tesla cool blue flash as the really old ones did recently. Which for a second had me frozen, fearful the lethal electric tube monster was about to burn my neighborhood down. But only for a second, and that was it. I remembered another guy saying this blue thing was a manufacturing deposit burning off and he could tell some tubes were good when they only gave a brief bit of this. So even though I’ve only seen it these two times it seems its nothing to worry about. Far as I know it hasn't happened again. As of this morning my house is still standing. Neighborhood too. Whew. But it was close there for a second. So be careful. Maybe hire an electrician.

Anyway the new tubes sound great. Not hugely great. Not like going from the near dead Melody tubes to the merely lotta hours JJ tubes. That was hugely great. This is more like what I’ve heard every other time changing tubes, just a little more articulate, extended, dynamic. Not life-changing. Enough to notice. Just like every other time. Including even going from 6550 to KT88.

Which, kind of a shame. If only there were more difference between tubes, then just maybe its worth hunting around for some really good ones. But the biggest difference is between old and new. Between new and new, its just not there.
noromance's avatar
noromance
9,769 posts
 
KT150?
Or you could go all out and get Marconi-Osram/GEC/Genelex/Gold Lion(original) KT88s. I have a pair not in use. When I did use them, my awesome but flawed Michaelson & Austin Tim DeParavicini TVA1 amp destroyed 2 of them. But when I had the quad running, they were sublime. Bass was a little ragged but the mids and highs were sweet and utterly three dimensional with infinite detail. Always tempted to build/buy a SET and use the last pair.
jburidan
803 posts
 
I doubt that there are many good OS tubes on the market. the good stuff has been picked over, sold, picked over, resold, etc., ad infinitum, and most certainly the shadiest crap is on eBay. So, don’t waste your money on OS tubes unless you met the seller at your Unitarian church, and have known him for at least twenty years.
millercarbon's avatar
millercarbon OP
12,531 posts
 
Well, whatever those OS tubes had going for them it wasn't magic. It could only have been manufacturing. Which is all known. Like the amps themselves, it is all right there out in the open. So you do like EAT did and copy the you know what out of it. Or, like the TubeStore, you get a tube maker to copy and tweak, tweak and copy, until you get the best version you can come up with. Which is what they did with the Preferred Series tubes I just put in there.

So I have zero interest in expending any energy whatsoever looking for NOS tubes of any stripe or vintage. It is at this point simply way too hard to believe the stories are anything beyond what can be accounted for by ordinary every day run of the mill nostalgia. Those were the days, etc. 

The only ones I would even be curious to try are the EAT set, because unlike all the rest they seem to be made with actual quality manufacturing materials and attention to detail. Which, let's face it, as much stuff as we've screwed and as many times as we fall short we can at least say for sure we're able to manufacture stuff at a much higher level now than 100 years ago- when we can be bothered to go to the trouble. Which the EAT guys seem maybe to have done.

So if you got em, roll em. Roll em right on over this way. Because, Unitarian, Baptist or whatever, at $1800 a set that is the only way yours truly gonna be bothered. 
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