Listening for tube degradation

Treat your tubed components just like you do your car. Simply put them on a maintenance schedule and routinely replace the tubes accordingly. I replace power tubes at about 2000 hours. This takes care of incurring a serious loss of sonics, or major shorts, due to age. I replace my small tubes, depending on use, about every 4000 hours.

Some may consider this early, but at least I don't worry about subtle degredation in the sound quality. Why invest all that money in audio stuff and then cheap out on the tubes by seeing how long they will last

Oh, power tubes lose bias as they age and you will find that you need to increase bias (ma's) as the tube ages. If you let them age enuf you will be unable to get the up to recommended bias settings.

Small tubes can get noisy and or dullish, i.e. loss of detail with age! I replace them all at the same time if it is a noise issue related to age to retain good channel balance.

FWIW.

Newbie, how often do you listen, because 2000 hrs on power tubes at 2 hours every day equals about 3 years? I don't have any friends that put that many hours on their system.

I 'work', when I actually do, out of my home. I turn my 'casual' system on at about 7AM and turn it off at about 4PM every weekday. So, on this system, I change my power tubes in my amp at least once a year.

I have a second 'system' (different electronics - same speakers) I use for 'serious' listening sessions, those when I'm not multi-tasking - usually at night or on weekends. In that system I've maxed out power tube performance and average about 1500 hours on the power tubes. I get to change these about every three years.

I guess I'm more than a bit wierd but I just love music and don't watch TV in my spare time. FWIW.

I've considered moving towards a SS amp as a result of this or investing in a tube tester. I get paranoid as well because I'm never sure if I'm getting optimum performance. I love the sound of tubes but I'm not sure if it's worth the maintenance effort. The best thing to do is to probably keep a stock pile of tubes on hand just in case.

Any recommended tube testers?

It always seems that I find tube failure being preceded by increased noise, such as when a tube in my phono stage started kicking off big thumps through my speakers and subwoofer. It is often difficult to hear when tubes have aged because they slowly deteriorate over time, whereas when you change them you get all of the performance back at once. Often you will just get a dulled performance over time.