Genuine Telefunken?

I suggest if you are going to buy tubes, that you use a tube dealer that has a good track record, and not just some guy selling a few tubes. Research some of the web based tube vendors and pick one that you feel comfortable with. You might pay a little more but I just consider it like insurance. The tubes that you put in your pre-amp should not be noisy and most of the good vendors will rate them phono, line or driver stage with phono being the least noisy. I personally like- Vintage Tube Services and have never gotten a noisy tube from him. I have also bought tubes on E-Bay that were so noisy that in my pre-amp they were useless,even though they were new old stock. Just my 2 cents

Tele used to relabel their tubes as 'The Fisher' You will find 12ax7 smoothplates so marked. Quite a bit cheaper than those marked tele too.

John C.

Sirspeedy - I was hoping to cost you some money last time with a new Hyperphono cable. 8-)~ A pair of PW's is small fry to that. As for CCAs, I have a pair of Valvo PW CCAs. I did not compare these to the Amperex 6922 PW in the Aria line stage as the 7062 here made this a moot point. And the CCAs I have are too noisy for the Aria phono stage so they landed in the CAT amps where they are very nice. I guess I could compare the Amperex to the CCAs in the amps. If I get motivated to do try this, I'll let you know. But I got a special D-getter pair of 7062's today from a friend so I'm a happy camper to play.

Jafox,one thing I am consistently amazed about you,is....

No matter what the "known,believed" excellence of "anything" audio is...

You can be relied upon to basically come up with a "new",not usually known/considered "take" on the subject!

DON'T EVER CHANGE!!

No matter what the "known,believed" excellence of anything audio is... You can be relied upon to basically come up with a new,not usually known/considered take on the subject!

Wow, thank you.....I think! 8-) I've tried to behave myself since my "contributions" to the Gabriel Gold thread last year.

I notice that my system-implementation priorities are much different than many people here. I read the reported major improvements of moving a VTA adjustment 1 mm or 2 and suddenly hearing images lock in. But I notice that many such systems use stock power cords, have little attention to power distribution, use stock tubes, have severely compromised ICs and tonearm cables, etc., and I shake my head. In my system I can move the Graham 2.2 VTA dial quite a bit and not observe anything like what I read about here. But I can change the IC from the line stage to the amp and hear changes that far exceed the claims of VTA adjustments. And thus I have focused much attention to this system link.

And look at the discussion concerning the RIAA accuracy to 0.1db. But if I can not be convinced that there is a piano before me with its incredible fundamental tone and follow-on harmonic structure and decay, the whole technical discussion of RIAA accuracy to this level is irrelevant. No matter how accurate the tonality might be, without the dimensionality being convincing, the game is over for me.

Last night the differences between two 7062 D-getter tubes in the Aria line stage were HUGE. I was going back and forth between the Graham2.2/ClearaudioAccurate and Zeta/KoetsuRWS because I could not decide which one was more fun to compare these two tube pairs. One pair was so much more holographic and dynamic and the other mellow and smooth. But both pairs put the piano in the room. With any number of other tubes on hand, this one key performance parameter would nose dive in an instant even though the tonality is much the same amongst all these tubes.

I have observed such tube differences since I got the tube-rolling bug with the Aesthetix 5 years ago. That's why I wanted to suggest to Noguerol not to commit exclusively to Tele or any other tube brand.

Trying different tubes can result in a discovery that can take one's system to a level that even a preamp upgrade can not achieve. Look at those who upgrade their preamp loaded with Sovtek tubes for another preamp loaded with Sovtek tubes. Gosh, it makes no sense as they never had a chance to hear the potential of what they had before.