Why are people paying these stupid tube prices?

  Prices are crazy on everything. Diesel $6.40 gal, 5.56 ammo $500 per thousand. You guys outta try feeding class III guns 😆. Maybe I should bitch about all the wanna be’s that have those cheap AR clones. The butt hurt factor is alive and well on AGON. Oh yeah I’m blue collar too. Just spent last weekend watching drag races in an ag field in central Ca. My problem is I dabble in too many things with too little money. So I guess we all suffer First World problems. I have to remember Rule 62 “ Don’t take yourself so damn seriously “. Regards, Mike B. 

Perhaps it would be best if we just prevented anyone that wasn’t part of your elite group from purchasing any tubes at all. That way, the people that deserve all the best in life, like YOU, will keep the best things in life for yourselves.

I knew this would rattle the sensitive ones looking for a fight and hyperbolic analogies to Marie Antionette (rolls eyes). I could equally state that guys like you who habitually drag these conversations to the mat are what gives the audiophile community a bad rap. Nowhere did I say it wasn’t anyone’s right to stick round plate 6SN7 or pinched waist 6922 into a Chi-fi amp. They’re not excommunicated from audiophile-dom if they do this. Just stated my opinion (backing the other guy who said it first) that there are better uses for these dwindling resources.

My Schiit Saga with the 6SN7 tube buffer will embarrass a lot of high price preamps. Yes. Bettered my ARC SP6B, no slouch. This stuff is really good. No waste of tubes.

@mulveling  it is a prevalent pattern to see folks rolling rare vintage tubes into cheap chi-fi or even cheap Schiit amps, especially headphone gear. Especially 6SN7 and 6922. It always rubbed me the wrong way too. What a waste.

Quite so. In economics an analogy has long been called "tragedy of the commons".  A slightly edited quote from Wiki -

a situation in which individual users, who have open access to a resource unhampered by shared social structures or formal rules that govern access and use,^[act independently according to their own self interest and, contrary to the common good of all users, cause depletion of the resource through their uncoordinated action.

The value of the tubes to the community is much higher than the prices they are being traded at privately.

Starting to feel like there’s a "go green" agenda or something! 😉  Politician: "Just go out and buy a digital/solid state amp."