Why are people paying these stupid tube prices?

Perhaps it would be best if we just prevented anyone that wasn’t part of your elite group from purchasing any tubes at all. That way, the people that deserve all the best in life, like YOU, will keep the best things in life for yourselves.

I knew this would rattle the sensitive ones looking for a fight and hyperbolic analogies to Marie Antionette (rolls eyes). I could equally state that guys like you who habitually drag these conversations to the mat are what gives the audiophile community a bad rap. Nowhere did I say it wasn’t anyone’s right to stick round plate 6SN7 or pinched waist 6922 into a Chi-fi amp. They’re not excommunicated from audiophile-dom if they do this. Just stated my opinion (backing the other guy who said it first) that there are better uses for these dwindling resources.

My Schiit Saga with the 6SN7 tube buffer will embarrass a lot of high price preamps. Yes. Bettered my ARC SP6B, no slouch. This stuff is really good. No waste of tubes.

@mulveling  it is a prevalent pattern to see folks rolling rare vintage tubes into cheap chi-fi or even cheap Schiit amps, especially headphone gear. Especially 6SN7 and 6922. It always rubbed me the wrong way too. What a waste.

Quite so. In economics an analogy has long been called "tragedy of the commons".  A slightly edited quote from Wiki -

a situation in which individual users, who have open access to a resource unhampered by shared social structures or formal rules that govern access and use,^[act independently according to their own self interest and, contrary to the common good of all users, cause depletion of the resource through their uncoordinated action.

The value of the tubes to the community is much higher than the prices they are being traded at privately.

Starting to feel like there’s a "go green" agenda or something! 😉  Politician: "Just go out and buy a digital/solid state amp."

Wow, I own a DS2 preamp, a Levinson 27.5 amp, and I own Schiit headphone amps, one has Siemens tubes, the other a E-6SN7, with good Focal headphones these cheap Schiit amps are pretty formidable in sound quality. The E-6SN7 tubed amp is the best, but these are not NOS. The Siemens amp is collecting dust, and the tube was before I bought the amp. I have a lot of old tubes, 12A?7s, 6DJ8s, 6SN7s, and more collecting dust. I have probably listened to all of them for at least a short time, so I can't sell them as NOS, other than a few Chinese 6SN7 and Russian KT88, and various 300Bs, so I must be the worst of the worst, listening to alleged NOS tubes, and making them slightly used just to determine how they sound, and them sitting on them. I also have a home made KT88 amp I haven't even plugged in...