Tube amp bias question or not?


I purchased a Jolida 502P amp as an experiment back in January for use with my Magneplanars (1.7's) and it has been absolutely wonderful. Love the sound and much to my surprise my very powerful SS amp (CJ) is not seeing much use these days.

Now to my question. The amp has Tungsol 6550 power tubes and being that I am a tube newby I check the bias every couple of weeks or so. Three of the tubes have held rock steady bias - never varies - 500 mv all the time. One of the tubes tends to very slowly drift down to maybe 495 mv, then I tweek it up to 500mv and then maybe a month latter it's back down to 495 or so. What causes this? is it the tube? is it normal, is it anything to worry about?
ejman
Hi Ejman

For me I didn't like seeing the red lights flicker a lot on the 502P. When I was striving for the exact 500MV there wre times I saw the lights really flicker a lot. That and I was under the impression for the amp to sound the best the power tubes should be biased at 500mv or a little above.

To your question about differences in sound when the tubes were biased above 550MV. I didn't notice any differences but I didn't have my power tubes biased above 550MV for very long. I had the 502P on for over and hour and played a couple of songs. Then checked the bias and it was 700MV on the tubes.

How this happened was I was power tube rolling between NOS 6550 tubes and Tung Sol KT120 tubes. I thought I had dialed down the bias enough before making the changes. I make the switch and then check the bias later and it was very very high.

So please be careful when you are power tube rolling and don't make the mistakes I did.

Lastly when I called Jolida to discuss the 502P they told me if you wanted to really make audible sound differences with the amp was to roll 12AX7 tubes.
The "blue glow" in my veteran 120s is gone...is this finally a sign of impending tube death? They still sound fine...hmm...
Wolf I read this on the web it might give you some idea of what your are seeing:
http://www.rru.com/~meo/Guitar/Tubes/blue_glow.html
The blue glow is back (I have read about it someplace)...noticed it last night, so I assume it merely went on vacation for a while.