6SN7 Tung Sol Reissue Mullard 12AX7 any comments?

i have mullard 12ax7 reissue, mullard 12ax7 long plate and sovtek 7025/12ax7wa. i have tried them in my cd player, a vincent cd s6. the reissue mullard is unbalanced, with an emphasis upon the highs. i do not like this tube. the mullard long plate is balanced but has no bloom. the sovtek is the osftest sounding of the three. i know, it is hard to believe.

All right, I couldn't stand waiting for someone else, so I just ordered a half dozen to try in my Atmasphere MA1s. When I come to any conclusions, I'll post back here - probably not until after the new year, though. I wioll be comparing to regular Electro Harmonix, not NOS anything.
Another thing I wonder about is if by the time you get around to trying a new tube type, if the old tubes are so worn out that anything new would sound good, but if you had different tubes all new, then did a shoot-out, you might think differently.

In a neutral system, the Tung Sol re-issue is a honky sounding tube...nothing smooth or natural about it. For a bit more, you can get into NOS Sylvania VT231 tubes...smooth and extended. Good stuff!

I am using the new Mullard long plates and new GEC Gold Lions (from what I have read, the consensus is that these are the most highly regarded new production KT88's and some say they are *better* than the originals) in an Audio Note Kit 2 and have no complaints. Both are good tubes. There is no *best* tube as they are all circuit dependent. I have not tried the new Tung Sol 6SN7 but it is certainy a different tube from the EH.

I have been around tubes for a long time and there is a lot of *marketing* hype in the world of NOS too. I am just happy to see good sounding affordable new production tubes.

OK, I got my TungSol RI 6SN7s. Visually, there was little difference. Eveything you can see looks identical except for the color of the plates. The EH have gray plates, the TS have black. I put 5 in one AtmaSphere MA1, and left the Electro Harmonix tubes in the other (I actually took them out and put them back in, in case that would make a difference, maybe by cleaning corosion off the contacts). I let the TSs bun in fo about 25 hours. I ran the outputs of my Wadia GNSC 850 to a Pass X1 preamp, which I set to mono. I then disconnected both speaker wires, and pulled them to one side so they were coming from the same spot, and I could not tell which was which. I labelled one A and the other B. I put one Talon Hawk with stand in the middle of the living room and did a blind test of the amplifiers with different tubes. I concluded the one with the Tung Sols sounded noticably better than the one with the EH tubes. The TSs sounded richer in the lows, more 3 dimensional, and more liquid. By comparison, the EHs sounded a bit metallic and flat. The difference was not huge; it was not like the change you get from changing a major component like an amplifier or CD player. The basic characte of the amplifers was the same, but one was a better version than the other. Unlike many comnponent changes, there seemed to be no tradeoff; I didnt' hear anything get worse going from the EH to the TS. The only question in my mind still is whether the difference was due to the design of the tube themselves, orr the aging of the EH tubes. The EH are about 1.5 years old, and have about 1200 hours on them (I estimate). I suppose I should buy a set of new EH to come to some real conclusions. I'll think about it.