Tubes becoming hard to get?


An article in today’s WSJ talks about tubes for both guitar amps and stereo gear becoming scarce due to Far East and Ukraine/Russian tensions saying most tubes originate from China, Slovakia, & Russia.  As such, people are beginning to Hoard and retailers are beginning to limit purchases. 
 

 

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Slovakian and Chinese manufacturers will fill the void, nature abhors a vacuum..

I only use small preamp type tubes that last thousands of hours...such as 12ax7, 12au7, and 5751's...which I have plenty of in reserve as they were all bought several years ago. So not really effected by it.

I don’t use KT90,99,120,150 or 170.

I haven’t had any issues finding valves. The last quad of GL KT88 was in December of 2021. I paid 220.00 for a 5% match vs 10%. The last I looked they were 400.00 + for 10% 800.00 for 5%.

Upscale might say 20% on some valves, ask about popular/expensive quads like Golden Lyon, Ruby, PSVANE, ANY NOS US, British, Holland, German or French Valve. 100% is more like it.

The rest are Russian or Chinese for the most part.

I love it when the same tubes have been for sale on EBay for 10 years. Mcintosh set of Russian or Chinese tubes for 2-3,000.00 dollars. They actually cost about 150.00 to buy separate without the box in 2020. I think the BOX was more expensive.

India has a production plant or two. I understand Turkey might get into the tube business. Italy has always had limited production. Belgium and Ireland both have inviting work forces and better spirits, from my understanding.

My hats off to Ukraine, now head for Moscow, while it’s still spring. When a country lets a murderer run their country and he threatens to NUKE people, he has to go. The Russians need to do the right thing. Poison the guy. I hope they have to bury him in a 1 foot thick lead box. Man they sure come up with some doozies in Russia. Steven Seagal, is he nuts?

I don’t think we have a reason to worry. Capitalism will gladly fill out any demand with replacement products, the only thing needed is demand and smell of profits. 
Even more, the new tube technology is coming. Check it out:

 

At this point this is old news really. I use tube amps and mostly NOS GE 6SN7GTBs (four of them in my preamp, one in my power amp) of which I have plenty, and just recently bought a back-up pair of KT66s (I have a stash of various tubes to last for years) for my little single ended amp. I just rested my aforementioned tube power amp to try a "tubeless but you’d never know it" Pass XA25...still breaking that thing in but so far it’s astonishingly good...may be resting my tube power amp for a while, thus sacrificing a chunk of my tube cred and avoiding any Russian tube quandry...Oh well.