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Re: 6C33C Blowups - Urban Legend or Fact?

My expirence with 6C33s is limited to the Joule-Electra OTLs which I have had extensive expirmence with for more than 7 years. I have couple customers with fairly old (close to 10 years) joule OTLs that have seen alot of use and the sockets are holding up fine. Now, the tubes do run hot and you can get a bit of carbon build-up on the fingers (the things that grip the pins of the tubes) of the sockets if they are not gripping well. Sometimes some cleaning and tweaking of the fingers (so they grip/contact better) is necessary. I have had to do this once and it was on a freinds set of amps that is around 10 years old... and in that set of amps (12 6c33s total) I only found a couple of pins in all the sockets that needed some cleaning and tweaking. From my talks with Jud Barber (Joule's designer) he has had a few sockets fail over the years - mostly due to the type of thing I described above.

So my experience is that this is more of a myth. Though I imagine if the tubes are run hard without proper ventilation around the socket that you could toast the sockets - espcially if the fingers in the socket are bent away from the pins so they do not make good contact. They are not the greatest tube sockets on earth I imagine, but with a occasional check (every few years) they should result in many, many years of trouble fee use.

I have seen (only once) a 6c33 tube fail while in operation (In a pair of Joule VZN-100). The tube blinked/flashed and that was it. The associated protection fuse blew immediately on the amp when the tube went, but there was no other damage. We replaced the tube and fuse in a few minutes and the amp came back up with no problems.

Happy Listening,
Rich Brkich
Retailer & Audio Asylum Industry Liaison


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  • Re: 6C33C Blowups - Urban Legend or Fact? - Rich Brkich 10:37:21 03/23/06 (0)


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