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I can get Sino, Ei, Electro-Harmonix, and Sovtek 12AU7s for $8-$10 each. That's about all I want to spend for the 4 tubes I need for this experiment. I'm a long time 6DJ8/6922 user and have tried many varieties, but the 12AU7 is new to me and I have no idea if my experiences with various 6DJ8/6922 brands transfers to the 12AU7 world or not.Which of these low cost 12AU7s comes closest to my ideal tube sound: extended top end and bass response, neutral, low distortion, no microphonics or hiss. If it is glare-y or bright sounding I will be VERY unhappy.
Are Electro-Harmonix and Sovtek the same tube? Any reason to pay $1 more for the Sovtek tube other than to enrich New Sensor?
Would spending as much as $15/tube for Philips, RCA, GE or others (that never sounded very good to me in the 6DJ8/6922 world) get me tubes that would sound better? Keeping in mind that "better" to me is lower distortion and neutrality versus extra- liquid/lush sound.
Follow Ups:
I've tried the following tubes in my preamp (Foreplay III):EI Elite Gold - best all around, warm but detailed
EI (uh, non-elite gold) - similar to above, a bit less bass
JJ - lots of bass, decent tube
Electro-Harmonix - ok, not too exciting, a tad dry
Mullard CV4003 - very, very warm, almost too warm - but great with certain types of music, female vocals, jazz...
RCA 5963 - very good all around tube, nice mids, but too damned microphonic.I keep coming back to the $9 EI Elite Golds... Nice tube.
There're lots of very good low cost 12AU7s. Milos mentions the Tungsrams, jeffreybehr mentions the EIs. All of these are nice tubes. If you're looking for a "neutral" tube, I'd also suggest the GE and Sylvania 3 mica gray plate 5814A. There're several sub-variants to both of these, but they all sound in my gear as you describe you'd prefer to have them sound in your gear. These are VERY inexpensive and, particularly the Sylvanias, very quiet. I wouldn't worry about the Sylvanias wearing the GB label or having gold pins.Some other tubes to think about might be any of the RCA 2 or 3 mica black plate tubes - 12AU7s, 6189s, 5814s. I think these can be very nice. Again, I wouldn't worry about these wearing fancy labels, like Command. Any branding will do. Or maybe an RFT? I relistened to some RFT ECC82s recently and really enjoyed them. There're a couple of different vintages and I think they're all good sounding.
Ya know, just the other day I plugged in some 'fifties vintage long black plate Sylvania 12AU7s and thought they sounded pretty darned good. May be a little on the lusher side.
Cheers,
Thanks for the info - that's the sort of detail I was hoping to get.
Very good low-mid cost neutral 12au7 tube isTungsram ecc82
I never heard a good sounding low cost 12AU7. Brimer & CBS/Hytron 12AU7 or 5814 are quality tubes.
My experience with the Electro-Harmonix 12AU7 in this preamp vs the Mullard JANs ($35 each) is that there is nowhere near $100 worth difference in total cost between the 2 sets (of 4) tubes.That's why I believe I can get a $9 tube to equal the performance of the Mullards by circuit tweaks and/or cryo - I can get the cryo done for almost nothing by putting 4 tubes the box with a bunch of other stuff going out for cryo. The Mullards are only a little more open/transparent, dynamic and "sweet" (harmonics, shimmer, smoothness).
I'd just get more E-H tubes, but never having heard the others in the same price range, I had to wonder if any of them were demonstrably better performers. I have a pretty strong bias against the Chinese Sino tubes after never having been happy with the sound of any Chinesse tube I've tried in a preamp or amp. But I don't want to discount anything at this point.
it really is not clear what you are attempting to do. You cannot use the tubes (6DJ8 and 12AU7) interchangably, so there really is no basis for a direct comparison. Moreover, if you have used good 6DJ8, your plan to use so-so 12AU7 makes for a particularly weird exercise. wazzup?FWIW, several times in the past I have seen knowledgable members of the asylum contend that the 12AU7 is not an especially good tube in general.
The 12AU7s are for a completely different preamp - I used 6DJ8s/6922s for many years in other preamps messing with all the usual suspects from Bugle Boys to Mullards to Telefunkens. This preamp uses 12AU7s and eats the 6DJ8/6922 preamps for lunch - it isn't even CLOSE. I'm using Mullard 12AU7s (well, a military equivalent anyway) in it now but hate spending $160 for 4 tubes. The experiments will try to determine if there's any treatment (cryo) or tweaks to the preamp circuit that can be done to get near-Mullard sound from ~$10 tubes. I've used up 1 set of Electro-Harmonix tubes in this preamp. They were surprisingly OK, but I want to get more-than-OK sound out of them. Figure if I start with a better ~$10 tube, the end result will be better.
...with them.
For just a couple bucks more buy some RCA cleartops.
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