Tube suggestions for Cary 805c

I have four 805b's (bi-amping) with NOS RCA 211's on top and NOS GE's on the bottom. I never liked the KR tubes in my sterio. Having tried just about every 300B including new WE's, I have found that the Sophia on the top and JJ on the bottom works great. Also, I find that different input tubes (6SL7 in my amps or 6SN7's in later versions) make a huge difference in the sound of these amps.

Cannot comment on the 845 but it has to be better than regular Chinese tubes. The Sophia mesh plate I like very much. I would recomend putting the 845 and Sophia tubes in and then refining your sound by trying different NOS input tubes. Keven Deal at Upscale Audio has a good selection, a great ear and lots of experience tubing 805's. Give him a call.

I use a Sophia 300b with the Shuguang 845B in my cary 805c. The combination sounds very good. When I went from a standard 845 to the 845B the sound stage became smaller but there was more detail. With the 845b tube the 805C sounds like a cary 300b signature on steriods.

Here: Shuguang 845B, TJ300B mesh plate ceramic base, Sylvania VT229

I owned a Cary 805C for an extended period which I purchased new. I would recommend the following for you. First, have Cary change the coupling caps to Angela or Jensen copper in foil caps if you havent already. Takes awhile to break in (really) but they will sound awesome. It will make a huge difference. Second, my absolute favorite tube combination was with new production western electric 300B tubes and vintage RCA 845 tubes. AFter that combination, I could not go back to any other tubes. The difference over the other combinations I tried could not be beat. My 845 tubes I picked up used so the price was not too outrageous. To me, for an amp of this caliber, its worth it to spend some money on the 845 if you plan to keep it. They will last for a long long time. You can also ask Cary to modify your amps so you can try vintage 211 vt4c tubes which are much cheaper (RCA sounded better to me) and sounded better to me than the chinese 845 variants You cannot directly plug in the 211 tubes without risking damage to the tubes and the amp. Cary sells a kit with instructions for this or you can also pay them $500 to modify the amps for this purpose. One last note, People say the 805C anps are shy on bass. They also say this about the new production WE 300B tubes. I found that totally false. The reason they "dont have bass" in other peoples eyes is that they are not running the amps with speakers that are matched to their capability. I can tell you that my ex 805C units configured this way, hooked up to a homemade JBL olympus size cabinet with JBL S8R components blew away many of my single ended and push pull amps. The bass was totally awesome and gave me goosebumps when I listened to them. Anyways, my 2 cents.