JJ 6V6s sturdiness

[bob p]

AFAIK JJ is the trade name the ( previously "state owned" ) TESLA company took after going private, back in 1993 ( if memory serves me well ), so they inherited the tooling/plants, but, as you said, there's more in vacuum tubes manufacturing than owning the right machinery - and we don't know if, after going private, the new owners kept the old ( but knowledgeable and experienced ) staff or not.

I know a little -- when I visited Slovakia in 2000, I met distant relatives who had been working in the same tube manufacturing plant since it was part of the state owned monopoly, TEchnika SLAboproudá, aka "Tesla". Even after it became an independent country, many things in Slovakia remained much the same as they were during the communist era, especially in the former state-owned enterprises that went private. Things didn't change very much for many people, who continued to work for companies that were essentially offshoots or reorganizations of the state owned enterprises. The change to democracy wasn't particularly kind to everyone in the country -- the people who had marketable skills that were in demand, and who were mobile, benefited the most. For the people who were unskilled laborers nothing really changed. If you rode the rail system after 1993, you'd never know that the railroad personnel weren't still working for the state owned a communist rail system. They still had a bitter attitude. Things didn't change that much for the average factory worker either. Not that many people changed their jobs. In the comm bloc countries if you were a brakeman in a factory, you tended to remain a brakeman in a factory for your entire working life. Job changes were never as common as they are here in the US.

One important thing to remember is that during the communist era, Tesla was known for producing a wide variety of components for the state, and the focus was on production volume, not quality. These components were seldom updated and like most comm block electronics, they remained in production long after their designs had become obsolete.

Is the JJ stuff any worse than the Tesla stuff of old? I don't think so. If the truth be told, the Tesla stuff wasn't all that great in the first place. Its just that in the communist era, the only stuff that finally got to our hands here in the US was the decent stuff, as all of the marginal stuff had already been weeded out. Today I think that JJ does a decent job at QC. I wonder how much of the reported QC problems are related to post-production shipping. When stuff gets shipped and reshipped several times, its hard to know exactly where the problems come from -- chances are that if you ship a tube often enough its bound to fall off of the sorting conveyor at UPS or FedEx.

With that said, I still think the JJ 6v6 is a decent tube. The only times I've seen them fail is when tey've been deployed inappropriately, like in over voltage situations and when the screen currents are insanely out of spec.