winged C vs Svetlana el34s?

[daz]

Been using winged C but now that they are no longer in production i need to find a similar sounding tube because i love them. Already have EH, Chinese, tung sol RI, and JJ and none sound at all like the winged C. I think i tried the svetlana years ago and felt it was too 6L6 sounding, but my memory may not be accurate being so long ago. How do the svet el34 compare to the C's tonally ? Also, are the svets made by the same factory and also going defunct?

[Jazz P Bass]

So we went from certain caps have 'tone' to certain tubes have 'tone'?

[Leo_Gnardo]

I think we're going to be hard up to find a tube as tough as the now defunct =C=. They WERE labeled Svetlana in the 90's and early 00's, up to the date New Sensor bought the right to distribute tubes under the Svetlana name - in the USA only. At that point the REAL Svetlana (made in St. Petersburg Russia) had to come up with a new logo and that's the flying C or winged C. So tubes labeled Svetlana since that time are made for New Sensor at the same plants that make their Sovtek and EH labeled tubes.* What date this took place exactly I don't know. I think Stan - km6xz - covered this matter in another thread awhile back. You could ping him and I'm sure he'll give you the truth about this matter, in detail, or at least direct you to his earlier comments.

I'm not a fan of this deliberate confusion-making in the market, but it's been a part of tube and everything-else marketing since forever.

Although they sound different from =C=, I've been using Ruby's Chinese EL34B MSTR and EL34BHT with good success for a few years, considering power and lifetime. And price. Customers aren't complaining and that's a good thing.

*Note that at New Sensor's website, they can ship Svetlana-labeled products only within the USA, not internationally. At least that's how it was last time I looked. Probably because the real Svetlana still had control of their name & logo everywhere but within USA. Such jiggery-pokery, feh!

[big_teee]

So we went from certain caps have 'tone' to certain tubes have 'tone'?

I'll come nearer believing the tubes have different tone over the Caps.
In my 2204 Clone I've used JJ KT77s, JJ34Ls, and EL34EHs.
They all sound different to me.
On the Metro Forum, some of the guys swear by the JJ6CA7s.
T

[Leo_Gnardo]

So we went from certain caps have 'tone' to certain tubes have 'tone'?

I'll leave the caps argument to others (for now), and I can't claim to hear a particular attractive "tone" to the =C= EL34's, BUT I definitely hear something in the =C= 6L6's. Some players report a "warm" tone in =C= 6L6's, and I hear a certain "tubbiness" too. Which I attribute to a looseness of construction. Over the course of a couple months or years in use I found =C= 6L6's to go microphonic, resulting in a low clonking or bonking noise, and sometimes full out ringing (though at low volume) at a low frequency @ 80 to 100 Hz. So there's an example of marketing a defect (loose grid/plate construction?) as an asset (warm tone due to low frequency resonance bump.) I would only fit amps with =C= 6L6's if the customer demanded them.

FWIW there were 12AX7 from =C= that had spotty reliability. Some of them made awful noises. But the ones that worked right sounded downright glorious. They had very big flat plates. "It's all about resonances" remarked one of my customers, and I suppose he's right.

[Leo_Gnardo]

I'll come nearer believing the tubes have different tone over the Caps.
In my 2204 Clone I've used JJ KT77s, JJ34Ls, and EL34EHs.
They all sound different to me.
On the Metro Forum, some of the guys swear by the JJ6CA7s.
T

I'm sure they do big_teee !

And there's some users as well as distributors that swear AT JJ's. I've found their EL84 and 6V6 to work well & sound good, and super-select 12AX7's (ones that don't make Geiger-counter noises) have very quiet noise floor if neutral-toned. For the sake of my eagle-eared customers, a tube that doesn't make its own noises is a good thing.

I used to use JJ 5AR4/GZ34 but they started shipping a lot of duds a couple years back, so they're off my menu. OK they're rectifiers but the noises I object to are arcing, popping fuses, and customers calling & complaining.

[daz]

Wow. Just wow ! So now i'm crazy because i hear a difference in tubes? If thats the truly what you believe, just get yourself a gorilla amp and one of those best buy fenders and stop posting at music forums because you have nothing to contribute if you're that deaf. Good god....

[Leo_Gnardo]

Wow. Just wow ! So now i'm crazy because i hear a difference in tubes? If thats the truly what you believe, just get yourself a gorilla amp and one of those best buy fenders and stop posting at music forums because you have nothing to contribute if you're that deaf. Good god....

Ease up daz ol' buddy, if YOU hear something that sounds right to you I'm not questioning that (tho others might). Mebbe I'm deef or just don't notice what you do. I am however impressed with the longevity of the =C= EL34 in field use, that is, amps that are used practically every day by my customers. And that includes the Svetlana-labeled EL34's that pre-dated the =C= label. Some from the 90's, still going strong.

All this and your original question still not answered, sorry for that. Please be patient & maybe somebody will come up with something... I have a feeling this thread may go on a bit. I am 100% in agreement that it's a shame the =C= are out-of-production.

[daz]

Ease up daz ol' buddy, if YOU hear something that sounds right to you I'm not questioning that (tho others might). Mebbe I'm deef or just don't notice what you do. I am however impressed with the longevity of the =C= EL34 in field use, that is, amps that are used practically every day by my customers. And that includes the Svetlana-labeled EL34's that pre-dated the =C= label. Some from the 90's, still going strong.

All this and your original question still not answered, sorry for that. Please be patient & maybe somebody will come up with something... I have a feeling this thread may go on a bit. I am 100% in agreement that it's a shame the =C= are out-of-production.

Don't worry, it wasn't directed at you. But that aside, I'd still like to know the difference between winged C's' and these...

[Leo_Gnardo]

Don't worry, it wasn't directed at you. But that aside, I'd still like to know the difference between winged C's' and these...
[ATTACH=CONFIG]22246[/ATTACH]

Thanks, no worries, & I understand some hear things I don't & verse visa. The tubes in the photo are date coded Nov 2002 which is right near the transition date, so I couldn't really tell ya. I'd ping Stan - km6xz - if I was you, about those.

More brands - EL34 currently marketed as "Mullard" and maybe also "Gold Lion" - guess who - New Sensor again. There are some who claim they're nothing more than Sovtek / EH with different paint and bigger price tags. But there's a highly reputable dealer who claims they really are something different. (Jim McShane in Chicago) Whether there's a tone match to your fave =C= I couldn't tell ya. You may have to go thru all of 'em again to pick a viable second-best you can live with.

[daz]

Thanks, no worries, & I understand some hear things I don't & verse visa. The tubes in the photo are date coded Nov 2002 which is right near the transition date, so I couldn't really tell ya. I'd ping Stan - km6xz - if I was you, about those.

More brands - EL34 currently marketed as "Mullard" and maybe also "Gold Lion" - guess who - New Sensor again. There are some who claim they're nothing more than Sovtek / EH with different paint and bigger price tags. But there's a highly reputable dealer who claims they really are something different. (Jim McShane in Chicago) Whether there's a tone match to your fave =C= I couldn't tell ya. You may have to go thru all of 'em again to pick a viable second-best you can live with.

I just grabbed that pic off google so the date in the pic means nothing. In any case i ordered a st since they are cheap at under $30 shipped. So i'll know soon enough. If they're as good as the C's i'll stock up.

[Justin Thomas]

Daz,

No, you're not crazy for hearing the dif in tubes.... FWIW I've not seen another tube brand with the brown base, and given the date code in the pic, they might be "real" Svets, later known as =C=, now defunct... anybody know if New Sensor/EH/Sovtek/Mullard/Gold Lion/etc. etc. use that brown base?

But if the price is right, what's to lose?

Justin

[daz]

Daz,

No, you're not crazy for hearing the dif in tubes.... FWIW I've not seen another tube brand with the brown base, and given the date code in the pic, they might be "real" Svets, later known as =C=, now defunct... anybody know if New Sensor/EH/Sovtek/Mullard/Gold Lion/etc. etc. use that brown base?

But if the price is right, what's to lose?

Justin

Yeah, I just figured at that price it's worth it to know what the real difference will be since asking on a forum is rarely accurate in determining what you will hear yourself. That picture by the way is a stock pic every seller uses, so it's likely one svetlana originally used and still does. So i'm not so sure thats what i'll get. But if it's anything like what i had years ago that were svet 34's, i may like them, as i recall they sounded like the C's in the one respect i like most about the C's. Could swear they had brown bases, but that was many years ago so i could be off about that and the sound.

[Steve Conner]

I believe that different brands of tubes can sound different. Capacitors is where I draw the line.

[km6xz]

Different brands, do "sound" different in the same circuit because they are not the same electrical characteristics, and few look alike on a curve tracer.
The tubes themselves do not depart "warmth, brightness, sheen, brittle" or any of the other non-sense words adopted from hi-fi psychobabble since any tube has very little frequency domain differences below RF frequencies. But putting a device with more gain or different rates of change of one characteristic or another into a given circuit will be expected to create an overall different transfer function for the total unit. When some says "get XYZ Fairy Dust Deluxe" tubes because the had a better top end to someone with a different amp than the person claiming better top end, he is being either dishonest or just unaware. He might like how he thinks his amp sounds but that means nothing to how another circuit will sound, or even how a different level or setting sounds. Tubes are pretty much neural when it comes to time domain characteristics. A 3db power point might be 60Mhz or 300Mhz so hearing more a bit more top end of 6khz over 1Khz is not going to be detectable by anyone due to any characteristics of the tube itself. But put a tube with different gain and sensitivity in a circuit with reactive components, feedback etc, than sure, one tube will "sound" different than another with different gain and sensitivity, how could it not? A signal sitting on a different part of a curve, a less linear zone, would have different distortion and mixing than another tube whose would place the same signal on a more linear portion of the curve. Normalize the gain and center point and those sound differences evaporate.
It is not like any tube carrying the same markings are the same in important characteristics, they aren't. Many of the tubes marketed as one type, say a 6L6, were long in production as different tubes with different markings. The Russian tubes for example that became the basis for most of the early rebrander 6L6 sold in the west was never a 6L6 and was never intended to be one. Mike Mathews and Aspen Pitman started selling the tubes as 6L6 when they discovered they could buy them in bulk for $.25 each, and re-banded them as Groove Tubes or Sovtek 6L6. There really has been no new tubes designed in decades so when what we have left are old designs of who-knows-what sold as common western long out of production types. Now we have hundreds of brands and only 5-6 makers of tubes. Heck, I have my own brand...you can also. The only companies that want to do business and cooperate are Chinese now so create a logo and buy in bulk. If you buy over 2000 of any one type the largest maker will even stamp your logo on them.

The tube that started the rebranding trend was the 6П3с which was a very common general purpose tube used in Soviet era TVs, radios, hi-fi, communications gear and industrial applications that were similar to a super duty 6V6. The close cousin for heavier duty use was the 6П3с-е, which was very similar to the western 5881 but stronger. Both carried Soviet era tubes ratings of maximum anode potential of 250VDC. They perform well however in guitar amps at 500vdc. They sound different than a 1950s RCA 6L6 or 6V6, they have to, they have different curves. So does everything else out there. A dozen plants produced tubes in Russia but the tubes were pretty interchangeable and consistent. The Chinese factories had their own domestic tubes but many were copies of the Russian tubes because there was a lot of cooperation between them for a while.

Probably the last tubes to be retooled for were the 1991-2 Svetlana EL-34. Svetlana never made a western style tube before so they saw a market in the west for western types and tooled up for it.
Yes, many were brown based but so were many European brands of the time so the pictured brown based tubes are probably pre-2003 Svetlana genuine tubes. But Tesla, Mullard and other had brown bases also.