-=> Quoting Gregory Gerasimenko to Steve McTague <=-
 GG> Hello Steve.
 
 GG> Where is your amp  produced?
Built by Solo Electronics out of California for Golden
Tube Audio.  They make mid-priced equipment, including
a pre-amp, 50 watt integrated, 8 watt 300B (this tube
is quite the rage, and VERY expensive) and 100watt amps.
 GG> AFAIK there are Russin companies in St-Petersburg (former
 GG> Leningrad), which are producing tube amps of audiophile quality.
 GG> Biggest producers of tubes are also located in St-Peter. They make
 GG> tubes with new names, but those are plain old Soviet tubes. IMHO their
One of the things that scares me is that there is alot of
talk about re-labeled tubes, especially in the new-old-stock
area where you acquire vintage tubes.  And the maze of the
different tube numbers that are sometimes interchangeable.
Some of the nicer tubes can get quite expensive...but its
fun for the 'tweek' factor of changing tubes to change the
sound.
 GG> quality is higher than Chinese. BTW many enterprises in former USSR are
Agreed.  I'll feed my amp Sovtek 5881s forever.  I've heard
horror stories of the Chinese tubes.  I've only had 2
Sovteks die on me, and that was probably my fault while
I was learning to bias the tubes.
 GG> still producing a lot of tubes. We have considerable amount of TV's on
 GG> tubes yet. It is not a joke!
 GG> Living here it is quite practical to have tube amp, especially if
 GG> You can buy ready tube amp from factory and then improve it.
I'm limited to tube swapping & biasing, electronics hardware
is NOT my game...though computer software is...
 GG> Now I'm considering buying of tube amp 50 watts and then improve it
 GG> to 27 or 12 watts.
I'm considering either buying a second amp, and bi-amping
or monoblocking the two, or getting a factory upgraded
transformer.  A used amp is only slightly more than the
factory upgrade, but I can't decide!
If you can get to the internet, rec.audio.tubes is a place
to start of other people who like tubes.  And I'm sure there
are alot of web sites too.
Have fun!
--- Blue Wave/386 v2.20 [NR]
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