What happened to the vacuuuuum? :rofl:Originally Posted by N4VGB
Just bumped into the Acura ad on YouTube, funny stuff: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=xe62LFmYMCY
"There's real gas in these tubes" the man says. Must be some of those cheapest Chinese numbers!?
Actually have an AF kilowatt setup here. It's not all that expensive to do (& do quite well). But, you have to "settle" for transistors.
The "vacuum" inside even good tubes has never been perfect, they all have some gas in them and they all produce some gas from the tube elements with use. Some of the carbon plate numbers outgas a lot with use.
I have plenty of tubes and iron to build an AF amp but I'm just not that big into music. Just about any old cheap commercial stereo satisfies my meager needs.
And yes I'm still mad at all the audiophools for buying up all the Eico 730 modulators, that one is a real shame.
No disagreement here concerning toob gas.
As for AF and music, I love it and often prefer it loud. Thing is, the state of the art in AF is now such that your "cheap commercial stereo" is likely to be quite good as long as you're not buying from the bottom tier. Marketing in AF stuff is simply amazing when one approaches anything near the fringe.
To my ears the class A SS stereo amps sound better than the high end tube numbers anyway. You can look at the specs on the old tubes and easily see that in AF service the modern SS devices are far superior. The big toroidal xformers used in the modern SS amps produce far less distortion than most of the vintage tube iron also.
But I'll also admit that there is a place for distortion in some music listening.
I make fun of them but I sold most of my NOS NIB WE 300B and 350B tubes to audiophools at unbelieveably high prices and they all walked away with huge smiles on their faces. There's one born every minute. ;)
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