Anything that vintage guys get nostalgic about.


Those all have octal bases. When I spoke of four pin, five pin, and six pin tubes such as the 80, 35 and 37, I was talking of tubes without the octal base... with ONLY those pins sticking down. The fatter filament pins were the only way you could be sure you weren't sticking them in rotated from the proper position, and a strong arm could get them in wrong.


I had them and I was familiar with them. I only have the Sylvania one today.


I gave up on it around 1969. And again, the basic circuits weren't the problem. The problem was stability of the tuned RF stages, big-ass triode tubes amplifying over the range 540 kc to 1600 kc. (We didn't have Hertzes back then.)

The owner of the store where I worked went to CES in Vegas (I think it was the first year after it left Chicago) and came back with a Mannheim Steamroller album. Someone played it and the bass was astounding, high end was very nice, but not terribly bright. After about a week, I decided to play it and looked at the label. They all had been playing it at 33-1/3 RPM, when it was supposed to be at 45 RPM. It sometimes helps to read the label.

We all liked it more when played at 33-1/3, so that's what we did.

Then, there's the good old 83 rectifier, with mercury vapor.

Oh, I was counting pins, not thinking about the base, itself.

Oh, we had Hertzes, we just kept them tucked away for special occasions. Kind of like the way some people ignored the Metric System in the late-'60s and early '70s. DOH!

I never heard of the 83.

Another topic is that I've had a small bag of voltage regulator tubes that I've been carrying around for THIRTY years thinking it would be so cool to put them in line on a narrow chassis and mount them on the wall. They aren't all the same color, and adjusting the current can slightly change the color, but they are all a very subtle shade in the purplish or pinkish range. Some of those are octal and some are 7-pin glass... would that be septal?

I had a summer job in 1967, I think, disassembling equipment. The age of the equipment was: military equipment... used... taken out of service... sold as surplus... physics department at UCRiverside used it... repaired it... took it out of service... one or two years later they gave it to me to take apart and keep whatever I felt might be usable.

I saw fantastic construction because lives depended on everything operating right and being serviceable. Every installation I do is a poor imitation of what I saw that summer. And nixie tubes, Philbrick amplifiers, just all sorts of stuff.

Look at this- might have ALL tube numbers-
[Link: en.wikipedia.org]

I have seen night lights that have a small tube with only the heater filament energized- I may make some of these since I have a lot of tubes that someone foisted on me. Glad I finally took them- I found lots of rectifiers, several preamp and output tubes that I have used in some of my guitar amps. I donated the small TV tubes.

I did car audio for a long time and one thing I grew to hate is unruly wiring where it traveled along the sill molding and in the bundles for alarm modules, etc. 12" or more isn't close enough for wire ties to keep everything straight and neat, so I eventually settled on roughly 6" between ties. This is also close to the spacing taught to electronic techs in the military and I worked with someone who received his training while he was in the Marines. We were working on an Acura NSX and as we installed the full alarm system and additions to the audio system, we also cleaned up the work that was done at another shop. He worked on one side and I did the other, when it came time to bundle everything before closing it and it looked very much like one person did the work because of the similarity. Eventually, the car owner decided to sell it and before he did, it was taken to a third shop to have all of the equipment removed. I had worked at all three shops and when I went to the one where it was being readied for sale, I heard the installer complaining about all of the wire ties. I said, "Look great, right?" and he went off like a rocket. It was pretty funny.

I was at an audio society event and they were playing some "male vocal" vinyl on a Audio Research / Wilson Audio /VPI system. I was listening as I was walking around the room and thought the music sounded a little odd but didn't pay it much attention as I am SO SICK of music that you never hear or would never play but it makes that system sound "Magical" crap.
So in walks one of the shops guys and says, "Um guys you do know that is a female singing" and proceed to flip the belt to 45 RPM.
They were all speechless as they all were huddled together critiquing the system moments before!
And these guy want to argue about filters, weighting, curves and speakers cables!
Jeezus H.

Please delete.

Is there a way to add a delete button when editing? That way, we could delete our own and not require mods to do it.

Speaking of slowed down, check this out-



I can't stand people who listen to the equipment, rather than the music. A former rep didn't respond to my comments about crazy cables and power cords, but one day, he commented on the new power cables for his Mark Levinson power amps- he said they used to take over 2 hours to warm up but with the new ones, it only took about 20 minutes. He also has his speaker cables, which are really heavily insulated, on what look like glass insulators from the lines near railroad tracks.

DOH!

What do you plan to do with the tubes? I might be interested in any 5Y3, 5AR4/GZ34, 5V4, 5R4 or 5U4. If you have old 5881, 6L6, EL34, 6CA7 or 6550, I might be interested in those, too.

Hey, everybody else: this is what you sound like to most of the world. See what it's like? It takes a very special kind of geek to show you what geeks sound like!


Are you interested in vintage tubes, or just those model numbers? I think a lot of those can be found on the internet. I'd go to Apex Electronics in Sun Valley CA for those. Their tube collection is way down (from what they had in 1970....) but they still might come through.

Oh, yeah: my favorite tube actually used in a radio was the magic eye. Please explain to the public!

I use those tubes in guitar amps- the newest one I have was made in '59. I also have a friend who builds and repairs them and he's always looking for good tube sources. Many of the new production tubes aren't good and the old ones were far more consistent & reliable. I was talking with someone else who repairs & builds guitar amps and effects- he said the 12AX7 and the others used in preamps (AT, AU, AY) are so frequently microphonic that he started buying them in case lots for testing before use. He even built a jig for testing them, to cut down on wasted time and money when someone would ship a chassis for repair and then call back PO'd because it started ringing after using it for a short time. It worked before it left his shop, but it just took more time to be a problem and he had a failure rate of around 30%.

You think this is bad? You ought to see/hear what the real cork-sniffers talk about when it comes to tone caps, tone stacks and phase inverters, etc. The terminology used when discussing the sound is worse than the geeks who are absorbed in high-end audio gear. I do it because a lot of the old guitar amps were bery durable, good-sounding and if they're only a service call away from being fully operational, the cheap ones can be donated or sold for a low price to someone who needs one but can't really afford it, whether they're kids, teens or adults. Same for inexpensive guitars- one organization is Guitars For Vets, who gives instruments to US service vets who need help/therapy re-entering non-military life when they have serious problems due to their service injuries, mental and physical.

Some amps are collectable and need tubes, but some of the new production are so far out of the original range of specs they can't be used safely- I had a Sovtek 5AR4, in a very collectable amp, that was supposed to provide B+ in the mid-high 400VDC range and it was actually over 500VDC. That could have caused component failures which might have damaged the transformers, resulting in a drastic decrease in its value. This isn't a rare problem with that particular tube, but I hadn't heard anything about the others until I inquired after I measured the B+ in my amp. When good, new tubes can't be used as a sub for the old ones, the old ones are a good choice because the supply is still good. People are still finding case lots of new, old stock and some are military surplus.

Re: magic eye- green, or orange?

Green.

I didn't realize that it was possible to build a vacuum tube rectifier with lower voltage drop than they had back in the fifties.

One of my personal just plain WRONG items was a workbench radio that I made from an old fifties car radio. I wanted to keep the car radio because, as with most AM-only radios, its reception was phenomenal. It's another of four or five radios I had here in Southern California when I was growing up which would always tune in KOMO in Seattle, KOA and KOB in Denver and Albuquerque, a station in Norman OK, and sometimes WLS and WWL in Chicago and Now Orleans.

Anyway, I removed the vibrator from the car radio, installed silicon diodes, hooked it up to about a forty pound transformer a ham operator gave men, and because 60 Hz was so much lower than the vibrator frequency, added probably 30 microfarads of capacitance to the B+ filter. That whole mess is why I say it was jsut WRONG. This was so early in my "career"* that I simply assumed things would be okay with the much much much lower forward voltage drop across the silicon diodes. Damn thing worked for ten years, then I moved on to other things.






*We know what "career" means as a noun. It's amusing that, as a verb, it means


Some of us have careers like that, don't we?

Somehow, I got a job at a stereo store and it changed my careen path.

careen jobber?

I guess the pop rocks and frisky Ford Pinto are the "More"

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