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Biasing your Tubes to your Room

As I move down the road of enjoying an all analog system, every once in a while there seems to be some kind of breakthrough accidental or otherwise. Whether it being moving into a quality tube amp, or adding another pair of speakers to the output chain,
today I was switching around my output tubes on my Scott 340B.
I was getting a bit more sound out of my right channel than my left.. and this has been going on for quite some time. Subtle enough to not be overly concerned, but always there
ever so slightly.

However, my readings were spot on as far as millivolts go.

So I decided to just trust my ears and tune the bias screws
to my ears.

I literally took the listening experience to another level.

Now the question remains.. by supplying a bit more juice to the left channel.. is it my ears? the room itself? The tubes?

Ultimately it's a listening experience.. and although using the bias to tune to your room or you.. is not conventional wisdom, it's without a doubt tuned the experience very tight and offering a much more refined listening experience.

While some might suggest I am shortening the lifespan of my tubes, I don't really mind replacing them a year early if the quality of the experience is substantially superior to what the technical specs suggest or insist.

Anyone had a similar experience?
astralography
brf
1,715 posts
 
Instead of over biasng one tube, why don't you try and under bias the other tube to balance out your system?
astralography OP
51 posts
 
I did explore that option, but in all honestly, it didn't sounds as good.
hifihvn
943 posts
 
First off, are they all the same type/brand of tubes? If different brands mixed, or a tube/tubes getting tired can do something like this.

Next, if they are all the same and good (tubes) , try switching the left and right source inputs and let and right speaker output from amp. If the opposite speaker sounds louder/better, then something is going on at your amp, not your ears. Maybe a resistor or something in your amps bias could be out of spec, if your tubes all match and are good.

Different brand of tubes can sound different when biased the same. Changing the bias to a higher setting might not be good trying to get them to sound the same.

If you bias tubes out of spec, you could hurt your amp to. Overheat and damage transformers or other parts, not just tubes.
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