Winged C 6L6GC + TubeDepot

[ajeffcote]

I have wanted to try some of 'em for a long time. I finally broke down and bought a matched pair from the TubeDepot.
The service from TD was great. Fast and accurate. My order consisted mainly of resistors and small amp hardware. A tedious order to fill, small quantities of many different items. So they get a big thumbs up!

The real reason I am posting is just to let anyone out there who is on the verge of plunking down the big bucks for some NOS RCA or GE 6L6's, buy these instead and put the $300+ dollars you will save into something useful, like an extension cabinet or a good mike. You get the idea. I have wanted a good set of 6L6's for a long time, but I thought it was NOS/big bucks or settle for tone that was lacking. I've tried other new production 6L6's ( Tung-Sol, Sovtek, EH, etc.) and have been disappointed in some way every time. Some were better than others but none of them quite did it for me. I don't know how well the Wings will hold up, but if one craps out it will hurt a lot less than if it were a $200 RCA.

One last bit of praise. I ordered a matched pair and the tubes I have are matched. Exactly matched. My cheap Craftsman meter may not be as accurate as a $300 Fluke but it does show that these tubes are drawing the same current at idle. Of course they may and probably will drift over time but I've never had a pair that was exactly matched before.
Thank you TubeDepot!

[Rhodesplyr]

I have twelve Winged-C 6L6GCs in my own amps and several pairs in clients' amps, including a Fender Bassman 70 with 515V on the plates and screens running ultralinear. I've never had a single problem with them. The ones in my own amps have been running strong for several years.

[ajeffcote]

I am so glad that there are finally some good tubes being manufactured again! And I'm really stoked about the Northern Electric/Full Music 12AX7. From all the reviews I've read, it sounds like they are a very high quality tube. I have just a couple of RCA;s left that I still use in the v1 slot, and i am just ruined for any of the usual new pre-amp tubes being sold. All of the ones I have tried, and it has been a bunch, leave me craving the sonics of the real deal tubes. But I refuse to pay the prices that are being asked nowadays for the NOS tubes. The limited supplies have been picked over so many times, that almost everything you might buy now, even if it is truly NOS, is a cull. The good tubes go into the sellers private stash and the culls are sold,then the cycle repeats itself and finally the worst tubes in the lot are sold for the most money. It's ludicrous!
I am still wary of the new Chinese tubes, but the Chinese are learning to do many things quite well. As a case in point, the quality of Chinese made guitars has drastically improved in a very short period of time. Who knows?

[JoeM]

I bought a set of the SEDs from Tube Depot about 2 years ago. They were well matched when purchased, but have since drifted quite a bit apart.They don't seem as nice as ones I got years ago when the company could still use their own Svetlana brand name.

I have a set of Chinese 6L6s that came with the Weber kit, not too well matched (Weber doesnt match them), but I was surprised that they didnt sound too bad, I dont think they last anywhere near as long as the SEDs though.

[tedmich]

people really like the Russian 6P3S-E tubes, the coin/wafer based ones sometimes sold as Sovtek 5881s, and you can still get a matched quad for ~$70

[Rhodesplyr]

I'm not 100% sure about this, in the sense that it's filtered through various sources, but my understanding is that SED/Winged-C did some fairly recent retooling of their factory to try to maintain quality--which was why they had to raise their prices.

[Zer09]

I'm not 100% sure about this, in the sense that it's filtered through various sources, but my understanding is that SED/Winged-C did some fairly recent retooling of their factory to try to maintain quality--which was why they had to raise their prices.

There's a gentleman who is a member of this forum and is actually from St. Petersburg. He's had several conversations with SED and the story he got was that the company is concentrating on other areas of their business so they are apparently making fewer. He was trying to become a distributor I think, and they were unwilling to even ship to him. I have a couple quads (EL34's) that I got back when you could get them for $50-60/quad but haven't used them because I'm waiting to use up the NOS tubes I have (mullard, tesla, rft/siemens/telefunken). I actually prefer those and the price of a pair of SED's is fast approaching the cost of the NOS RFT's. I once bought a pair of their 6L6's but never got around to trying them because I have so many NOS and ended up selling them for double what I paid ($29) when prices started soaring.

[abbottamps]

I usually give my customers the option of putting in Winged C tubes, but the price difference usually steers them towards some burned in JJ's from CE Dist/AES. I've been having really good luck with the JJ's. They seem to hold up really well and improve the sound quality in comparison to whatever Sovtek/Groove Tubes, etc that are usually in the amps I receive.

I have =C= 6L6's in my personal equipment and I always have, but the last few pairs of =C= EL34's I got had internal shorts right out of the box and had to be sent back... I'm not sure if it was coincidence (maybe sent me back the ones I had already sent back to them) or if was just really bad luck. Hopefully it's just a fluke, but in the past they've always been more durable in higher stress amps (like old Orange OR amps, etc).