Elrog 300B vs Takatsuki 300B tubes

Got a little excited and didn't read your last sentence. I'm not getting my hopes up with the Amtrans guys.

Charles1dad, did you end up paying import duty fee on the Takatsukis? If so, how much?

Dracule1,
That purchase was 4 1/2 years ago and don't recall any import duty(it may have been factored in the cost I paided). The tubes were much less buying from them than Axiss who was the American importer at that time.
Charles,

I bought my Takatsuki pair from pricejapan. Their price after fees is actually the same as the price + fees quoted from amtrans. However, amtrans won't accept paypal payment and I really don't want to wait in the banks to wire transfer and thus I bought them from pricejapan. Anyhow, the price has increased by 10% since I bought them and the wait time has been much longer.

Too bad I cannot and may never be able to do a Taka vs Elrog comparison - my Elrog pairs died on my Lampizator Big 7 and they were sent back long ago. But I do prefer Taka a lot to EML 300B XLS on Frankenstein. Maybe a tiny bitter worse than EML for big scale but everything else better.

I am now settled with Taka but I do hope that Elrog could fix their reliability issue. They were top 300B tubes for sure.

By the way, the Takatsuki 274B is also great but also expensive (priced close to vintage WE27B NOS).

Amtrans is a Japanese vendor of various audio and other electronics. I have bought a couple of pairs of Takatski 300b from Amtrans. I have found them totally reliable and honorable. Only sometimes they are slow to answer emails from the US. (I once had a Japanese friend call Amtrans after my emails had gone unanswered; Amtrans immediately emailed me. Not sure whether the issue was a server or language depending on who was the office.) Amtrans has also been helpful in working with Takatsuki to cull a pair with a low mA as recommended by my amplifier designer.

Takatsuki has had three US distributors: Axiss, Amazon, and now Trueaudiophile. The US price has always been higher than the direct-from-Japan price: 140,000-150,000yen (the price was increased when they introduced the black bases) vs 1800USD from Amazon and now almost 2000USD from Trueaudiophile. When Takatsuki has a US vendor, Amtrans will not sell direct to the US. Not sure about other Japanese vendors, but it might be similar.

Whenever I have bought something from Amtrans, it has been shipped EMS. Delivery has been fast (less than one week - often a matter of days) with no import duty. In my experience Amtrans has always accepted PayPal; in fact, Amtrans insisted on it.

If I needed something from Japan and it was available from Amtrans, I would not hesitate.