Would you buy a tube amp if you were unable to use vintage tubes in it ?

I stumbled into NOS GE 6SN7GTB small tubes years ago and haven't looked back. They last REALLY long, use 'em in my Freya and Had Firebottle. Nothing sounds better to me (emphasis on "me"). Power tubes get changed around for fun and are all newish...Gold Lion KT whatever, Sovteks here and there, cool looking huge Chinese rectifiers, and sometimes weird transistors in my Pass XA-25...those things sound like tubes sort of so they get mentioned...sorry.

15 years without replacing a single tube. That's incredible.

Vintage used could be $100 each, but if you wanted to match dozen EL34 tubes..that would be a problem. And, yes, you couldn't be sure in advance of significant improvement. Well, vintage tubes were not created equal.

Actually I would  need two matched sex-tets, but still. . . .

Yeah, Brent from Audio Tubes might be able to deliver it for you if you place a custom order, but the cost..probably at least $150 each for used test NOS, more likely $200 each.

Fifteen years for the amp and linestage and the tubes that were put in those two components were old to begin with--they tested good, but prior usage was unknown.  Both components run the tubes very gently.

I also run tubes in a headphone amp and a phono stage.  I would have also recorded no tube failures in these two components as well, except a shelf collapsed onto the power supply of the phono stage and wrecked both rectifiers.  This is a very odd phono stage-Viva Fono- that utilizes two 300B tubes as rectifiers.  So, this was not a cheap replacement caused by that shelf failure.