REF5SE tubes

Having used both Tube Depot and The Tube Store in the past, I would highly recommend Brent Jessee at audiotubes.com.  

He is well respected and can give you his personal recommendations. 

Tubes should be available now from ARC. I have a Ref 5 SE and got tired of waiting for ARC to replenish their stock. They said they had to reject 90% of the tubes they were getting in. So I bought tubes from other vendors and lost the ARC "magic" sound. While hopefully waiting for those tubes to "burn in", ARC notified me that they finally had my tubes in stock so I ordered a set for spares. When they arrived I thought I'd switch them out with the ones I had previously purchased and right away the magic was back! So I am recommending ARC's matched sets, they are picky for a reason.

I've often bought tubes from Music Direct and never had an issue.

+ 1 million for Brent Jesse. Every time I’ve dealt with him has been an excellent experience! Every single time.

Does Brent Jesse even sell any 6H30 tubes? They’re not listed anywhere on his site, even the "complete stock list". I would never have picked him as a source for these tubes. He’s good for a NOS GE 6550 on the power regulator, though.

Viva Tubes still lists up to matched quads of the Sovtek and EH Gold variants in stock. I’ve had good luck with them when sourcing matched KT88 tubes.

I collected some sets of ARC Select and Platinum grade 6H30 from Upscale over the years - though I’ve now moved on from my ARC Reference components. Quite frankly, I found "plain" Platinum grade non-cryo just as good. Also tried those ARC Select in a Rogue Hera II preamp (octet of 6H30), hoping to quiet it down, and it didn’t make a lick of difference - still noisy as hell on 96dB speakers 😅