Current 6L6GC tubes...Tung Sol, JJ, other?

[GlennW]

I'm going to splurge and get a quad of new tubes for a bass amp, an ESR B-2000.

Any recommendations on good current manufacutrers, or ones to avoid?

Thanks.

[Rob Mercure]

"Tung Sol' isn't a "brand" but a variation of the Reflektor/EH/Sovwrek marketing hype - possibly a good tube but the original Tung Sol corp is defunct. "Real" Svetlanas - the "winged C" tubes are a good buy as are JJs - especially for the price.

[GlennW]

Thanks Rob. Are the "real" Svetlanas still in production?

[Rob Mercure]

Glen,

Very much so - but not marketed as "Svetlanas" in the USA. Since I can't remember the Cyrillic characters that form the Russian Svetlana simply referring to them as "winged C" - as most distributors do - should be sufficient. And these are truly good sounding and reliable tubes.

Rob

[GlennW]

Thanks again, Rob. I ordered some of these.

http://cgi.ebay.com/6L6GC-SED-WINGED...QQcmdZViewItem

I hope they're the good ones.

[Rob Mercure]

These are the right tubes - but if you ordered from the this flea-bay source the price really isn't that "competitive" for a pair of these tubes (I really can't determine how many tubes are being sold - but this would be a great price for a quad).

Antique Electronic Supply has these for a pretty good price as does Ruby and others. And don't buy the bull shit that this vendor is thowing out about the boxing - SED doesn't sell lower quality tubes in bulk. I should know as I bought them in bulk while managing BRM's service shop and out of two boxes of 100 tubes I never found a "dud." I did have to match them myself and there were a few tubes that I could only pair up with one other - the bias requirement wouldn't allow me to form a quad - but none were "seconds" in any manner. The vacuum tube doesn't care if it's in a plain white box or in a pretty multicolored one - only the customer does and the only time the customer saw the boxes was when I returned their old tubes to them after a "tube job" and usually the customer just stated "keep the old ones."\

Oh, and perhaps current wisdom has changed but I was reviewing the tube matching section of the Radiotron Designer's Handbook 4 a couple of days ago and their recommendation was that beam power tubes weren't truly matched until they had been "run-in" for 50 hours under signal load!

Rob

[GlennW]

I did buy them last night. I sold some stuff on ebay and this guy has 99.3% + feedback on over 5,000 transactions so I felt ok with it. He was a little higher than who you suggested, but not much.

I'm going to learn how to set the bias with some other tubes, then put in the new ones and do it again.

Thanks again, Rob.

[gtrdad40]

let me pass on a lesson that i learned the hard way! don't buy amp tubes off ebay!!!


check this guy out: www.eurotubes.com

ask for bob, he lives for this stuff! and he is super friendly! a real good guy.