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What is the best place to buy tubes?

What is the best place to buy tubes? I've read several threads on Audiogon listing many tube stores, but where can you get quality? I bought tubes from Tube Depot (listed many times here) and paid extra for matching. Not only weren't they well matched but 1/3 of them were bad, so I suspect the tubes I received weren't actually tested. Then they sent replacements, but half of those tested bad. I bought matched sets from The Tube Store, but they were so poorly matched that the distortion was worse that the old tubes they replaced. I've bought from equipment manufacturers (CJ, ARC) and found they do good testing and matching, but their prices are very high. Is there any place to get tubes that are matched well and of good quality? Thanks.
holos
ehaller
98 posts
 
Try Leeds Electronics in Brooklyn, NY. You can find them on the web. What I don't like about Upscale is that they charge more if you didn't buy equipment from them. At least the last time I checked they did.
sherod
1,681 posts
 
I highly recommend Doug at Dougstubes:

http://www.dougstubes.com/

olimpico
33 posts
 
Andy at Vintage Tube Services. Great guy, great tubes.
arkprof
182 posts
 
Nothing but excellent service and tubes from thetubestore.com ... just my experience
ghosthouse's avatar
ghosthouse
3,718 posts
 
Wow...interesting. I've had 2 JJ Tesla KT88s from the The Tube Store fail at ~400 hrs and ~700 hrs. When I wrote them about the first failure, they indicated expected life was >1000 hrs and I must have gotten a bad tube. I thought it was just my bad luck.

I also paid extra for matching replacements from The Tube Store only to find the "matched" replacement wasn't "plug 'n play" as advertised. Give that biasing is not a big deal on the 502B JoLida, not a problem BUT something other than advertised.

Holos- Thanks for your post. "You don't know what you don't know"!

Order fulfillment from Doug's Tubes was very fast but I can't yet comment on quality.
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