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What is the best place to buy tubes?

What is the best place to buy tubes? I've read several threads on Audiogon listing many tube stores, but where can you get quality? I bought tubes from Tube Depot (listed many times here) and paid extra for matching. Not only weren't they well matched but 1/3 of them were bad, so I suspect the tubes I received weren't actually tested. Then they sent replacements, but half of those tested bad. I bought matched sets from The Tube Store, but they were so poorly matched that the distortion was worse that the old tubes they replaced. I've bought from equipment manufacturers (CJ, ARC) and found they do good testing and matching, but their prices are very high. Is there any place to get tubes that are matched well and of good quality? Thanks.
holos

Showing 2 responses by ghosthouse

ghosthouse's avatar
ghosthouse
4,279 posts
 
Wow...interesting. I've had 2 JJ Tesla KT88s from the The Tube Store fail at ~400 hrs and ~700 hrs. When I wrote them about the first failure, they indicated expected life was >1000 hrs and I must have gotten a bad tube. I thought it was just my bad luck.

I also paid extra for matching replacements from The Tube Store only to find the "matched" replacement wasn't "plug 'n play" as advertised. Give that biasing is not a big deal on the 502B JoLida, not a problem BUT something other than advertised.

Holos- Thanks for your post. "You don't know what you don't know"!

Order fulfillment from Doug's Tubes was very fast but I can't yet comment on quality.
ghosthouse's avatar
ghosthouse
4,279 posts
 
Newbee -
Don't mean to beat up on the Tube Store if it's the manufacturer's quality issue. Also, just to be clear... the expected life/hrs they cited for the power tubes was well over 1000. When writing last night I couldn't remember the exact number so I just wrote >1000. It might have been in the range of 1200 or 1500 hrs. In any case, I expect they were being conservative though, as you can see, 2 JJ Tesla KT88s never made it nearly that far.

I did buy Ei Elite 12AX7s and NOS Mullard 12AT7s from them and those are still working just fine.

The Tube Store order fulfillment service has been great though I was not impressed with their matching service.

I didn't really appreciated that a tube failing suddenly could cause damage beyond a blown fuse. Thanks for the warning.
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