Tubes, Tubes and more Tubes...

@ Dill - my apologies as no disrespect was intended.  I got from your experience  that you were running an on-line business of selling tubes.  This was not what I was getting from the OP and certainly not what I saw myself doing at that point in my life.  I sought out advice from a number of people in the industry, I spoke with a lot of people.  It's work, the sweat equity type, no escaping it.  Whether it's something you want to take on or not, that is where my comments were heading.  Hats off to what you were able to accomplish.

Rich 

"NOS" means never used except in your tester. Most come with original boxes, some JAN tubes do not. This term is overused and one of the tube dealers mentioned above sells "NOS in white boxes" which means test as new in white boxes. Not the same thing. NOS is like being pregnant you either is or you aint. Can be hard to tell sometimes.

Test results are no indication as to the use or lack of with a tube. With new factory tube test results varying up to 20% or greater with these old stock offerings it is not rare to see a lightly used tube test higher than a new tube. Further, there are a number of additional things one can do to asses the condition of a used tube. I think that life (cathode strength) tests are invaluable in this regard.

Selling old stock tubes has been my sole source of income for over 20 years and I just recently opened a 2 channel dealership. I would be happy to make an offer on these tubes, but as others have pointed out there are many variables at play and I wont give you a higher price unless I can test before making my offer. 

As detailed above, NOS is a often incorrectly used term.  The only tubes I ever bought that were labelled NOS that I thought were possibly the real deal were Telefunken ECC803 tubes.  The boxes they came in were the brightly colored boxes typical for these Telefunken tubes.  When I carefully tried to open the box, the end flaps practically crumbled.  They were very old and fragile at that point.  It appeared that the tubes in those boxes had been in there for a very long time, which greatly added to the credibility of the claim of NOS status.