Anyone know what company makes the Bugera 12AX7A

[olddawg]

I know it's Chinese and has pretty good reviews.

[Enzo]

It may depend on what month production. Many OEMs use more than one supplier, and have then house labeled.

[Leo_Gnardo]

Could be anything. You think a China company would use Shuggies, but I have seen China amps show up with house labeled JJ's and Sovteks.

Plus there's a recent new China 12AX7 with triple mica, I got a couple in to try out from Ruby/MagicParts, but havent' done enough testing to rate any way but OK/acceptable. I guess they're Shuggies but there is another manufacturer over there that aims for the hi fi market and sells their tubes at $60 a pop labeled "Northern Electric", using the logo of that now-obscure Canadian company. Needless to say at $60 our impoverished musician friends avoid them and I doubt you'd find them as factory installs in a new bargain price amp.

If you can post a photo that shows the tube's innards clearly I'll bet you get an answer.

[olddawg]

They are actually being sold now as a general replacement like Electro Harmonix. I know they are a rebranded something.

[km6xz]

Shuguang will build tubes to your plans and really the only volume producer in China. Tom, owner of Magic Parts/Ruby has a small factory and makes a 12AX7, GZ34 and 6V6 that are all very good, the GZ34 is the only decent one available. Hi-Fi brands order a couple thousand and get fancy boxes, and sell their $4 12AX7s for $60.
New Sensor experienced a dramatic cost of production drop....50% so naturally RAISED prices so they actually make 2.5 times what they did just a year ago.
So basically you have New Sensor, JJ, Shuguang and in a small way, Ruby, as the only manufacturers of the 150 brands out there. The best tubes were from Svetlana(the real one, not the New Sensor branded Sovtek's labeled "Svetlana") but they ceased production in 2012 of glass tubes but still make metal ceramic exterior anode BIG tubes with their 111 year old factory in St Petersburg Russia. There are still a few stashes of last production run 6L6 and EL34 Svetlana's(Wing-C logo). I snagged a bunch of both for about 1/2 the price of the New Sensor lower quality versions.
It would be possible to build precision tubes now that lasted longer and had more consistent performance, and at a fraction of current prices is modern automation and materials were used but no one sees a big enough market to justify a few million in automation and engineering. The world wide demand for glass vacuum tubes is tiny so there would be poor return on investment even if you captured 100% of the 4 million tubes sold each year.

[g1]

If they are not Shuguang, then they are probably TJ Full Music. They get good reviews and I believe that is what the new "Northern Electric" are.

[km6xz]

Considering that Uli would not pay over $2 per tube and be one of the highest volume buyers, do you really think very low production (when they were available and are now discontinued) hand made 12AX7s would be the source. They apparently produced a few dozen a month and then went out of production.
Just by the process of elimination of those which could not supply the volume at the price demanded, who else but Suguang could fill the order?

[tedmich]

Definitely the one with the lowest quote at any given moment...

[g1]

do you really think very low production (when they were available and are now discontinued) hand made 12AX7s would be the source. They apparently produced a few dozen a month and then went out of production.

That's why I said "if they are not Shuguang". Aside from TJ & Shuguang, are you aware of any other Chinese production facility?

I was not aware that TJ 12AX7's were hand made, they retail for $50 so at a wholesale level they would be much less, you can hand make for that?
I was also not aware that they were out of production, the Northern Electric are still readily available. Please provide any info you have on the TJ facility.
Why would it not be possible for TJ to build a cheap 12AX7 for Bugera?
I'm inclined to agree they are probably Shuguang, but I would have expected olddawg to recognize them if they were common Chinese tubes. And as you mentioned, Bugera would probably want the most common, cheapest option from Shuguang, so that would rule out any new version as it would increase the cost.

[km6xz]

The company importing and promoting the TJ brand, Grant Audio, said they are no longer in production.
Tom McNeil makes 12AX7's in his own factory but I am pretty sure he does not make enough to supply manufacturers. When he had the supply agreements with Peavey for example, he could not use his own, so he use the commonly available tubes from the other 3 companies.
All tubes are hand made, but there are fewer hand steps with New Sensor and Shuguang. Even Svetlana, which is much bigger and at one time one of the largest in the world, still had most operations by hand. Automation is too expensive for such a low volume product. If modern techniques were used, a EL34 would have 2% tolerance and cost $0.25 but the market is just not large enough to justify that investment. A fab plant spend gigantic mountains of money to make something much more exacting and tighter tolerance and gladly competes at $0.10/item. The cost per tube for New Sensor dropped in 1/2 this year but MM RAISED prices so his $1-2 tubes are wholesaling for $14, even that markup is not attracting the investment capital to capture the market. If any serious investor was interested they could own the entire world market by producing better tubes at lower prices and being easier to deal with. With the experts in making tubes dying off quickly the window of opportunity to do that is fast closing. In 10 years, that expertise will be all gone and no one will want to start the industry from scratch again with basic and applied research. The current companies have no research divisions.
If more consistent tubes were available amp designers would build more consistent sounding amps and everyone would benefit. Now it is just smoke and mirrors and flim-flam artists selling $50-500 tubes due to some magic properties that is not reproducible in any proper objective tests.

[g1]

The company importing and promoting the TJ brand, Grant Audio, said they are no longer in production.

I can only conclude that TJ cut a new deal with Northern Electric, and Grant Audio is now out of the picture? I'm guessing "Full Music" was their own brand and that brand is what is out of production, not TJ itself.
The Northern Electric packaging is even similar to the Full Music, and they invoke the name of Zhe Shen Liu so there is no doubt they are made at TJ.
www.thetubestore.com - Northern Electric Audio Tubes

However, TJ does seem to be aiming for the lower production, higher end niche, so as you stated earlier, it is quite doubtful Behringer would be dealing with them.

[tedmich]

you must have gold pins...and colored glass!

[km6xz]

The implied superiority of small scale hand made items over engineered and mass produced items is a marketing dream come true for small companies who have that one "advantage" over the much much lower priced automated production items. Real world experience and statistics indicated just the opposite however. The only reason tubes are problematic now is that they ARE hand made and have great fluctuation between alignment and assembly that would never happen with a precision robot. Since going to more automated assembly and even design, everything in our lives are more reliable and cheaper. An early Winchester Drive has MTBF of hundreds of hours and cost 10s of thousands of dollars for 5mb diskspacks but we get upset if our $67 2tb drive turns up bad sectors after years of use. If the photos of the Chinese maker's facilities are accurate representations, they are a tiny operation without the resources to do proper materials testing and analysis. Relying on the hyped reputation of a single man who is claimed to be an expert yet no research papers appear under his name that I could find, just like all the hi-end hi-fi experts trotted out as having the the super secret answer to life's questions and reversing all physics as known to man, similarly have no publication or patent records of anything noteworthy. They all come and go with each season after skimming a few million from credulous hi-fi and guitar wannabes who grab onto the latest theories of how main stream companies are suppressing the "real" discoveries. When I read the flowery articles pushing new secret sauces of the day, always at extreme prices, I have to laugh after seeing the inside of the hi-fi and music world.
I remember on occasion where a well known music/equipment reviewer for one of most popular high end magazines described a recording in great detail about his review amplifier made the violins placed on the sound stage in their proper place which was sadly missing from conventional run of the mill $25,000 amplifiers.
I ran into his at a trade show and asked him about it to make sure he was so sure of his pronouncement. I knew him because he reviewed a series of amps I designed for a hi-end manufacturer a few years before. They were decent amps but not worth the prices commanded because the manufacturer placed strict constraints on choices of parts, some ordered before they even had a design. 40 watt mono at $5400/channel as their "budget model" and $45,000 for a pair of class A 833 with 200 watts.
They got glowing reviews, even the one sample that had a defect unknown to us when it was shipped to him. The review directly earned the company sales of about 600 pairs of the "cheap" amp.
I questioned him about the recording he was firm in his declaration that the amp reproduced the stereo image so accurately, perfectly that he joked that he could tell the hair length of the violinist. I let him talk on until I mention I was involved in that session. He got quiet. It was done in a church, mostly, all stone construction, and the reverberant field was so strong we had to multitrack that chamber group and record as a pop record one track at a time in a side room that had large tapestries and a better natural recording environment. There was no sound stage, no group, each instrument recorded track by track when sitting in the very same single chair in the middle of the room. It was close mic'ed and all ambiance was added back at the studio. That was a long time ago and ever since that time have been keenly aware that it is all unmitigated bullshit conducted by people who know they are cons. After that time I found many instances of top rated gear with impeccable measured published data that was all faked.
In the early 70s I designed what was going to be the first digital FM tuner for a company on a contract and shared an office/lab with Nelson Pass who later become well known for his amp designs. He was working on developing the Heil Air Motion Transformer and ended up doing a lot of it together. When it came to time to submit the new speaker to major magazines we went back east to for review by Julian Hirsch's Hirsch-Houck Laboratories which was known as the best and most honest in the industry. We had tested the speakers thoroughly and had all the graphs and figures and knew every positive and negative, the positives greatly outnumbered the weaknesses we knew but what would the great man himself say and measure. He was a legend in hi-fi at the time with Stereo Review. He was very nice and cordial, asked lots of technical questions, seemed to know what he was talking about. But he wanted to test alone so we left and returned to California. We tried to explain an unusual dip in a narrow frequency band that if he was not prepared for might downgrade the speakers. He asked for a few clarifications by phone but otherwise said the review would be out in the next issue. The company was naturally very nervous since a positive review meant millions in sales and a negative would mean bankruptcy. He sent a copy of his review with graphs by mail which arrived just before publication and asked for any comments. The review was over the top, a home run but Nelson and I knew the tech part and were taken aback by the graphs and charts were far better than ours, it appeared to be perfect. Nelson called him and asked why they turned out so much better than we measured. He replied that we were all in the same business of encouraging and growing the industry and what harm is it to smooth out some minor indicators which likely were faults of his own testing? They did sound good, they were low cost relatively and had superior mid and highs, we knew that but his review really was not honest. With in a year the company was outselling the largest hi-fi maker of the time, JBL. It sold by the millions. If someone with his reputation to protect was fudging reviews, I could imagine all the lesser lights in the industry were doing far worse. I found out I was right. Hi-end tweaky snake oil hi-fi became a major con and major industry for a while, almost all based on the same sort of phrasing seen in the Northern Electric's articles and promotion. I have seen nothing to indicate they have anything of note. The same thing has become common in guitar amplification. I set up regular "golden ear" and product tests in my studio under controlled conditions and a number of well publicized brands and products turned out to fail even when the companies hand picked their golden ears. Believe it if you wish but don't be surprised if you hear anything, it is only your imagination.

[Chuck H]

The company importing and promoting the TJ brand, Grant Audio, said they are no longer in production.
Tom McNeil makes 12AX7's in his own factory but I am pretty sure he does not make enough to supply manufacturers. When he had the supply agreements with Peavey for example, he could not use his own, so he use the commonly available tubes from the other 3 companies.
All tubes are hand made, but there are fewer hand steps with New Sensor and Shuguang. Even Svetlana, which is much bigger and at one time one of the largest in the world, still had most operations by hand. Automation is too expensive for such a low volume product. If modern techniques were used, a EL34 would have 2% tolerance and cost $0.25 but the market is just not large enough to justify that investment. A fab plant spend gigantic mountains of money to make something much more exacting and tighter tolerance and gladly competes at $0.10/item. The cost per tube for New Sensor dropped in 1/2 this year but MM RAISED prices so his $1-2 tubes are wholesaling for $14, even that markup is not attracting the investment capital to capture the market. If any serious investor was interested they could own the entire world market by producing better tubes at lower prices and being easier to deal with. With the experts in making tubes dying off quickly the window of opportunity to do that is fast closing. In 10 years, that expertise will be all gone and no one will want to start the industry from scratch again with basic and applied research. The current companies have no research divisions.
If more consistent tubes were available amp designers would build more consistent sounding amps and everyone would benefit. Now it is just smoke and mirrors and flim-flam artists selling $50-500 tubes due to some magic properties that is not reproducible in any proper objective tests.

Don't hold back Stan. Tell us how you really feel

I always enjoy your posts on tube manufacture. There's a sense of berating the industry while simultaneously lamenting it's condition. On the up side... As long as China is manufacturing, we'll have tubes. The adaptable nature of their abilities and history of the Shuguang product speak to that. They may cost a little more once everyone else backs out and then again if major brand amp and home audio builders back away from tubes. But we'll probably have them, at a higher cost, for our antiquated designs for as long as any of us will need to get them. I don't have much to base that prediction on. It just makes sense to me.