NEWS: W-E tubes for guitar amps are coming. … link below

[jazzkritter]

Exclusive: Western Electric confirms plans to tackle the tube crisis with its Georgia factory | Guitar.com | All Things Guitar

[AllanAllen]

Oh look at that, American made tubes. I bet they’ll cost more than the imports and people will still buy them. I’m feeling smug.

[ruger9]

Wow. But yes- they will be VERY expensive. Moreso than anything other than NOS.

[st.bede]

I bet they are priced to sell ... not sure what that means, but I doubt it will be like the high end audiophile type of thing... my guess is twice to 2 1/2 times as much as we are use to paying ... then again I am just guessing.

(I will withhold my smugness, until the prices come out... that way I can fade into the background if I am wrong).

[jazzkritter]

On pricing from the interview:

“Labour rates in the United States are much higher than in Russia or China. Additionally, the materials we use are of a higher quality. So, the price will be higher.”
“For those wondering, however, our plan is not to take advantage and charge an absurd premium for new tubes.“

Higher but not absurd. We shall see.

[Nick71]

Made in USA

[6v6ster]

Hallelujah! We just need more tube production in general as displayed this year!

I’m super excited to try these. Long live tubes!

[BigDaddyLoveHandles]

Freedom Tubes!

[Litterick]

Bring back the valve! Britain can make it!

[jazzkritter]

And MG Bs! Please!

[Brian859]

For whatever reason I was reading about western electric and found their new website. They are making 300b tubes and 300b based amps. Here is some pricing.

[Cunamara]

And MG Bs! Please!

But not the Lucas electrical system.

[nevershouldhavesoldit]

But not the Lucas electrical system.

Lucas - the Prince of Darkness! My first new car was a ‘67 Mini Cooper S. The points plate in the distributor wouldn’t hold the points at a stable gap on delivery, the fuel pump failed at 6 months, and the coil died at about a year. I loved it anyway……for a while.

When I got the car in August ‘67, I’d had my 175DN for 7 years and my B15N (a great amp for jazz guitar) for 4. They both gave me many years of service with zero problems, and they both fit in the back seat of the Mini. I sold the car after 16 months of overheating and a host of minor problems for exactly what it cost me. The 175 and B15 stayed with me a lot longer.

Since then, I’ve restored and raced many old British cars from Lotus 7 to MG-TD to Bug-Eye, plus a pair of original
Minis. I used American electrics in all of them - ignitions, fuel pumps, lights, relays etc.

[jim777]

I wish I knew you better Dave! You have lived a life!

[nevershouldhavesoldit]

I wish I knew you better Dave! You have lived a life!

Thanks, Jim! I've been amazingly fortunate to have lived a long and healthy life immersed in the things I love - family, music, art, guitars, cars, food, and a desire to see and learn about as much of the world as I can before i leave it.

Threads like this one really highlight how the world has changed since I was born. When I was a kid, we bought vacuum tubes in neighborhood stores after testing the old ones in the tube testers they all had. Seeing a celebratory post about outrageously expensive new production tubes (exotic ones to boot) has me scratching my head in amazement. I look forward to hearing how these new tubes perform. I suspect that few who buy them will have experienced the originals, and those of us who have are almost all so far removed from the last encounter that we don't really remember accurately what they sounded like. To be honest, we loved and were grateful for the progress represented by permanent magnet speakers, simple circuits with 6L6s , etc.

My father had a Stromberg Carlson audio system when I was born that had a big field coil speaker and huge honking tubes (I don't remember what they were). It was close to the state of the art in immediate postwar audio and I used it as my first guitar amplifier. SC made some fine stuff - the amp pictured below was a top quality audio amplifier in 1950. It made 10 watts RMS at 5% THD and it sounded pretty fine. But amps from the early '50s and before were more finicky and fragile than the stuff we know and love today. The best of it sounded pretty fine, but not so fine that I'd put up with the idiosyncrasies now. Even finding techs to maintain them well is hard in most pats of the world, and the cost of maintaining them is high.



At least I can still work on my guitars and amps at home. Hot rodding guitars is fun, although swapping Duncans for Alumitones lacks the visceral excitement of dropping a honking V8 into a BugEye Sprite. When we sold the house and downsized to an apartment, I lost my shop and no longer have machine tools or the space to build cars. When we decided to downsize, I'd just built a street rod from a '48 Ford F1 pickup. It was a lot noisier than an old single coil! I put a 283 Chevy V8 in it with an aluminum Powerglide and the rear end from a Jag XKS. Here's a shot of one side of the 20x30 garage in our house with 2 of my restoration projects ('63 LeGrand H-modified sport racer and the 16th Lotus 7 made):



Now my audio and guitar bench is my workshop. It's not the vast work space I used to have, but at least it's something. I recently restored Jazzkritter's amps (Twin, Princeton, and 2x6L6 2x10 Fender clone he built himself) and am planning an old style tube amp from scratch. If the prices on these 300Bs come down to a reasonable level for me, I may recreate the past just to remind myself what it was like. But I'm very very happy to be living in the 21st century. I don't miss much from the 1950s and '60s, and I miss almost nothing from the last 3 decades of the 20th century