Tube ---- Ei 12ax7

An approach I was able to take successfully on a few occassions - but which may not be practical or available to everyone - was to get 10-20 of these tubes from a local guitar or repair shop that stocked these tubes, and where I could find a guy working there who was understanding of my requirements and would cut me some slack. What I'd request was to be able to take the tubes home for a few hours, and test them all by simply inserting them into the input stage of the phono preamplifier I was using at the time. I would cull the good tubes (for noise and microphonics only), separating them into those that would work in the phonostage, those that would work in less critical stages (amplifier input stage, guitar amps), and those that were rejects. Then as per my prior agreement with the shop guy, I'd take back the rejects in the afternoon for a full refund. This way I was able to be happy without paying a pretesting premium, which I have unfortunately found to be no guarantee of acceptable performance, and even though pretested tubes that don't stack up can be exchanged, you often wind up paying too much in redundant shipping charges on top of the higher initial cost.

P.S. - Trelja, not only haven't I tried the Svet's, I also haven't tried the LPS Sovteks, which I believe Albert Porter prefers among the current crop (though I think he's OK with the EI's as well). So I should really just say that I prefer the EI's to the Teslas, regular Sovteks, and Chinese 12AX7's (and also latter-day Sylvanias), but not imply that I have gathered all the evidence to say the case is totally closed in my mind.

Ei 12ax7ln's sound pretty good. I havent put that many hours of listening in yet, but so far I am impressed. They may be a little dry sounding. However, listening to more material is in order before a final opinion. I am impressed with the seperation. Details seem to abound without any harshness or over exaggeration of the highs. A relatively wide and deep soundstage is present as well.

These particular tubes are the Low Noise model. I can say without reservation that there is almost no "hiss" or any other audible tube noise.

More later.

Just a note, Distortion: As far as I know, all the EI 12AX7's will be the same "model" as one another. The 'Low Noise' designation will simply mean that the particular ones you bought have been pretested and culled by the reseller to represent something like the best 10% or 5% of the tube crop tested (along with being priced higher), while the remainder are sold for less without the 'LN' tag.

Zaikesman, hello. Have you had the opportunity to give the Ei KT90s a listen in your amplifier? If you, we are curious to your impressions. Take care, Joe

Joe, this unfortunately didn't work out from a technical standpoint. I'll be updating the original thread.