Great article covering popular types of power tubes – from guitar amp perspective, but applicable to Hi-Fi as well. Read
What is your experience? Comments
Fun article about Globe vs Shoulder type tubes with great tube pictures ๐
And here we go again – tube matching, this time preamp tubes – the topic will never end, but I hope to bring some clarity to it
There is a question, does one size fits all? In tube world – it’s not all but you might find treasures in places where you don’t expect.
Let’s consider a very simple case of 6BQ5 or EL84.
A few articles to help you figure out if matching is important for you.
Some of you might have been asking the same questions as I did – Does tube rectifier change sound? How effect does it have on a sound?
To test this, I put together an amp that takes 5U4 rectifier, but could be easily be replaced with 5Y3, 5Z3, 5AR4 and of course solid state rectifier.
Ones and for all, I proved to myself at lest that RECTIFIERS DO CHANGE SOUND! Keep in mind that I was one of the biggest doubters.
What?! How?!?! Why?!?!?!
Buying tubes on Ebay could be a lot of fun, but at the same time is very complicated and very frustrating (based on the personal experience), because you never know if the tubes you are going to get are going to work or last beyond a week or a month.
There are steps that you can take to avoid fraud and enjoy the newly acquired treasures for a long time:
Have fun!!!
I was always very skeptical about selected tubes. I mean, how much different could it be from the non selected tube from a reputable manufacturer (we are not talking about Chinese tubes here). I got 4 Telefunken 12ax7 Selected Tubes when I purchased my McIntosh 275. I plugged then in, and they sounded very nice. Then I looked up the price of the tubes and they were going for $225 each!!! “This is crazy” I thought. How can a tube cost so much compared to the non-selected version that you can buy for ~$40 on a good day. Given that these were NOS and everything, but come on. So I put them away. Later on I decided to sell them – $900 is a lot of money for 4 small tubes.
Tube rolling with MC could be a lot of fun and could lead to a sound that you will not only like, but love. The flexibility is just incredible. This post will focus only on preamp tubes. Power tubes are out-of-scope ๐
There are 7 preamp tubes in reissue MC 275, V1 (12ax7) – phase-splitter, V2, V5 (12ax7) – input amplifiers. V3, V6 (12at7) – output tube drivers, V4, V7 (12at7) – Cathode followers.
Found this very interesting site about vintage tubes. Great resource for beginners!