I would pay attention to what @ghdprentice said as I would bet he has tried almost all of them.
Western Electric 300B problem
So I recently purchased pair of WE300B, Friday night first listen. At start up heard mechanical pinging and popping, pre muted so nothing through speakers, after the pinging and popping ended, pre out of mute heard nothing unusual through speakers. No issues other than blue glow at tops of tube throughout 5 hour listening session. Tonight I power up tubes for second listen, immediately see left monoblock tube goes completely cloudy with blue fog throughout tube, this along with popping, right monoblock tube fine.
So it seems I have gassy tube, lost vacuum already! And here I thought recent improvements with quality control there had solved these issues. Not happy with this purchase, been running Psvane Acme 300B's for nearly 1000 hours with no issues.
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@SNS Sorry to hear of your bad luck and you have my sympathy. I’m sure most people on this forum have experienced this kind of frustration and disappointment and it’s not fun at all. I have 4 WE 300B’s that I bought from Upscale. They have been flawless. They were noisy the first time I fired them up and they did emit a slight odor. That scared me. After that it has been smooth sailing and I like them. However, my amps came with Shuguang’s top of the line 300B’s. Just to see if I could tell a difference I re-installed them last Spring. To my great surprise I liked them better. This is not a dig at WE, those tubes are wonderful but I’m slightly happier with the Shuguangs. |
Upscale states on their website and with a sheet I received with tubes, "Every power tube is burned in for 72 hours before matching", I believe this based on my initial listening session. Having forgot this I was extremely surprised on 'mature' presentation, having much experience with tube burn in via exclusive use of tube pre's and amps since 2000 these didn't present as fresh out of the box tubes. Wonderful mids, pretty extended on top, open, transparent, these are not attributes I generally find with new tubes. I was extrapolating a fully burned in presentation as I listened, something I never do with fresh power tubes, in other words I found these something near final presentation. On one hand I understand finding offense with this as tubes have limited life spans. On the other hand, this is good thing, should assure better matching and less early tube failures/returns from end users.
@mwood The fact you also experienced the odor is somewhat reassuring. I've never smelled this odor prior with these amps, hard to describe the smell. |
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