orangejello
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- Joined
- Apr 18, 2019
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I collected a bunch of those years ago and still have a pretty sizable stash. Mainly focused on Amperex, Mullard and JAN 6922 from the 50s and 60s. As I recall there are some that are very fetishized. Seems there were some Amperex “pinch waisted” variants that peopled payed a lot for. I don’t remember if they sounded in any way special. But I do recall winding up using the Amperex 6DJ8 tubes from that period in preference to anything else.By the way, I'm in the midst of building a collection of 10 different pairs of 6DJ8 to be used in phono stage tube rolling shoot-out. My thought was to make rips and post on ASR, let people vote via polling.
Since 10 is too many to compare at once, I'd probably have to run it as a bracketed competition, a la World Cup.
I have a crap-load of small signal tubes and it was fun to tube-roll, especially in phono preamps. My current phono pre uses 1x12ax7, 3x12au7, 5687, OA2 and EZ80. Oddly enough though, one of my favorite 12au7 tubes turned out to be the garden variety Chinese tubes. They are very low noise and clear, and so do very well in a low voltage gain stage. The buffered output of my phono preamp is implemented with 2x12au7. Here I use the RCA clear tops which are quite tasty. RCA seems to have made a lot of those. You often find them in electronic organs.
Anyway, have fun!