EL34 upgrade

Good recommendations here. At the lower end of the price scale the SED Winged Cs are excellent. The Gold Lion KT77s I bought from Jim McShane were rock solid and sounded wonderful and I also really liked the NOS Siemens like the ones Upscale Audio is selling. The Siemens were made by RFT in East Germany and rebranded by Siemens but they're wonderful tubes.

Sfar is correct about the "Siemens" EL34's. Of the three sets I have, they're branded Siemens, RFT, and National, but they're all exactly the same. I definitely should have called them RFT's to be more accurate. Upscale does have the tubes branded Siemens, but these and most other German EL34's of this era (including Telefunken) were all made by RFT. Regardless of the branding, I do feel that they're excellent EL34's.

I would not avoid NOS Tesla's, they are very good sounding EL34.

I agree. The Winged C's are excellent for the price. I just got done recapping 2 Marantz 8B's and put 2) quads of the Chinese EL-34's in. Seem to be very very good and strapped the amps are putting out 77Wrms across 8 ohms. Can't beat that.

Jazzerdave,
Thanks for bringing up the Shuguang Treasures, you are correct that it is out of my price range here in the US. I travel to China/Asia usually at least once a year and believe they can be found for less than half of the US price. If they are significantly better than the Winged Cs, gold lions, and siemens I'd be willing to wait as I'm planning to be in Hong Kong and China this summer. Also thanks for the offer to demo the Siemens, I may take you up on it if my asia trip falls through.

Lastly, I was under the impression that all EL34 tubes were compatible, apparently they are not, so how would I determine which ones work with my amp?

-JerseyWalt