bg, back in 2003 I saw an ad on that bay site for tubes. guy was near little rock, ar. no pics that I remember, just the words , "I have barn full of tubes, and don't you be showing up in no little pickup truck and a uhaul trailer, cause they ain't gonna fit and I ain't helpen to load em."
so I called a buddy and we took his 10 cyl pick up and a 16 foot walk in car trailer after I won the auction for 1700+. figured we got 200 boxes of tubes, some hundred pounds or more, 10 tube testers, 13 full tube caddies, 27 old cedar military round crates, and boxes full of old tube magazines, the works. he got his barn cleaned. guy built cannons in his garage that could shoot a coke can filled with cement a half mile, we liked him. my buddy is strong Christian guy, and still travels country singing and putting out cds, and when the guy I bought the tubes from offered to show us pics of his wives titties, we left pretty quick, ha. still see the look on my buddies face.
anyway, figured I got between 50k and 100k tubes from that one trip, spilled out of trailer and pickup bed, cab, everywhere, filled my one car garage at the time floor to ceiling. sold 2200 dollars worth of them first week, paid for tubes and trip. always joked that they were "my retirement." Tubes were about a 200 million worldwide business back then. Last I read a couple years ago, they are now around 4 billion a year business, as folks have bought the old copywrite names of tung sol, gold lion, mullard and lots of others, some claim they are produced on the original equipment, but almost everyone agrees that they can't compete with the old 1950's-60's for the sound and those have skyrocketed, at lest some of them. you can even buy a tube cd player at Walmart that has plastic viewer that shows a china or russian 12ax7 tube glowing for effect.
I tossed out 5 90 gallon plastic trash cans over 5 weeks, full to brim, just to thin the herd I had in that garage, now surrounding walls of current three car garage. looking back, no doubt I tossed out thousands worth as new amps have been developed that use some of those tubes that were not popular back in 2003-4.
tubes are so cool as each one is a bit different and has its own life to it. like you, I thought I had blown out my ears, once falling, along with every one in the last row of the first section in the old Rochester war memorial to hear the WHO just before they destroyed their instruments. I don't even think we knew we were on the floor, and back in those days, security just came up to us and told us to have a nice trip as stuff was being passed around. oh how times have changed, ha.
ears rang for 3 days after that one concert, made Watkins glenn, weeks after Woodstock, 500,000 people was that estimate, then they started clamping down harder.
I guess point is, even after that misspent youth, I absolutely love the sound of tubes and can hear them breaking in over the first 100 hours or so. really open up, have soul, almost like living thing as tubes get used up and eventually die with the sound changing over time. I have some really nice class A solid state amps I don't even listen to any more. All tubes now except home theater tv system.
Anyway, one can start with a china amp and save 80-90% over a usa amp. Yaqin has a 100b KT88 push pull amp, well built for under nine hundred dollars, with upgraded power tubes, includes 3-5 day shipping from hong kong, in your home, 40-60 pounds.
Bob Carver of Carver audio is building tube amps on the bay site as he gets older, as is the retired founder of Cary audio now. I have one of his, 5 watt 807 single ended amp that is unreal, built for 24x7 operation, rolled the Russian tubes and WOW. So far I can't afford any of Bob Carvers, but his bay ads an the comments and questions he gets and responds to are fabulous.
I run all mine on variacs, allowing 110v on old dynaco amps and only 94.5v on my yaqin 100b, I have 122 coming into house and don't want to blast all that at once so I just turn them on slowly upping voltage. You can use one variac and power strip and control by actual switching on amps depending which one you are using, keeping 5 or 6 amps plugged into one variac that way.
on a stock note there have been at least two purchases of 350,000 shares during a one minute span today in xoma as someone either covers a short, or is looking for an upsided future......yea.
AI
