Why aren't new vacuum tubes as good as old ones?

The tube manufacturers of today have lost the "old formulas" for making quality tubes. The Russian tubes of today were formulated on "Military" tubes designed to keep Migs flying through "atomic clouds"!

There was a link on the new Mullard site worth checking out. It showed the process of making tubes in the 50/60's. Watch that and you will understand why a) they don't make them like they used to and b) why there was a big push to go to transistors. The amount of machinery, the precision necessary at every step, and the error/failure rate even at the Mullard factory are fasinating. That said, some of the new manufactured tubes are pretty good and seem to be getting better.

It would seem by trial & error over the years that there should be no problem manufacturing a superior tube. Even the machinery involved in producing tubes could be compacted, streamlined, and improved given this computer age. It may simply come down to supply & demand, maybe not enough orders to justify the factory investment. Audiophiles represent a small segment of society, thus the demand is not that significant since a tube's primary application is an audio circuit.

Quite simply because life and death no longer depend on the quality of a vacuum tube, the way it did back in the hay days, during WW II, when tube technology drove design and manufacturing to the maxx.
We now just use tubes for a casual hobby, lives are no longer at stake, so there is a HUGE loss of military funding for vacuum tube design and manufacturing quality standards.

Cheers,
John

As Jmcgrogan2 mentioned, when military electronics, including radios, guidance systems and computers, were run on tubes, their reliability and endurance was paramount. Therefore, the tolerances, consistency and reliability of the tubes than ran the equipment were driven to the extreme. Hence, vintage tubes of the 40s, 50s, 60s and even 70s (particularly Eastern Bloc) were of excellent quality that cannot be matched today simply because modern military electronics don't require it, and therefore there's no large scale market to drive tube quality.