Genelex Gold Lion KT-88 reissued tubes

Put a matched quad GL KT88 in my Yaqin 100b. Could not believe how good they sounded. Within 2 months, two could not register a bias, a third went alarmingly hot and orange and blew a channel (resister). My learned repair person was very anti this GL reissue. Replace them with JJ's. I'm back, but it's going to be hard being satisfied without that GL reissue sound, but they are just too expensive to keep replacing. What's better than these JJ's?

Pooty

Like so many others have posted here, I too had Genelex Gold Lion Tubes fry (with likely no more than 150 hrs on them) and take with it my amp. In any event, the shop made clear that the Genelex KT88's failure was the culprit. So... I guess I am numbered alongside a half dozen others here who have had the Red Lions go down.

This seems to be ample reason to stay clear of the Red Lions.

Typo on the last post --- they are Gold Lions --- not Red Lions... perhaps it was my anger over how readily the Gold Lions fry that I had the color red in view.

So... stay clear of the Gold Lions... unless you are OK with replacing them often.

Larryrup Perhaps you can try the Chinese tubes from Shugaung (spelling?). My tube guy says they sound glorious --- but are also thought to be unreliable (like the GL tubes... maybe worse).

It is frustrating, this tube thing ... like a high maintenance wife who is awesome --- and who you cannot live w/o who is, at the same time, really, really tough to live with. So it is with tubes... can't go back to SS after living with these babies... but the lack of reliability is horrible --- so... about all you can do is enjoy the tubes when they work and prepare for trouble when they fail.

Hey everyone. This thread is now 4.5 years old, and so I thought I'd throw in my 2 cents concerning many of the earlier concerns/experiences people had with the available offerings back then. I still stand by my results/conclusions as reported in my last post on 4/7/10. And my Shuguang Black Treasures have been running reliably 8 hours/day +/-- for the last 18 months. From time to time, I swap them out with my (very strong testing) NOS Gold Lions just to see if the Shuggies are holding their own sonically, and they are. It's so easy to overlook deteriorating performance in many parts of an audio system (just with normal use) when nothing actually blows up! Not just tubes, but TT bearing lubrication, dirty connections, etc. However, the Black Treasures (still $360/quad premium, shipped from China) sound just the same today, against the vintage Gold Lions ($800--$1400/quad used,) as they did right after their 300 hour burn-in.

If they are still the same after another six months, I may just go ahead and sell my two remaining quads of GEC KT88's, buy a spare quad of Shuggie Blacks, and spend the extra $1500 on some new vinyl! (You can't spin tubes!)
.