Post by CAJames on 01/03/23 at 17:27:19
Hey Dom,
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The ebay link is the ebay store for Langrex:
https://www.langrex.co.uk/products/el822cv2382-mullard-valve-tube-new/
If you're only comfortable buying "matched" pairs you can get "matched" EL821s here:
https://www.ebay.com/itm/280473488039
or here:
https://www.langrex.co.uk/products/el821-cv2127-6ch6-mullard-matched-pair-nos/
That might be a good way to dip your toe in the pool.
You can buy from the webstore if you want, but ebay is cheaper on shipping.
Some other options are Mullard Magic:
https://mullard.org/search?type=product&q=el822
And Billington (my favorite place to buy tubes):
http://www.tube-and-valve-electronics.co.uk/aboutus.asp
but buying from them is a bit of a production.
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Unfortunately for you "tube matching" is a bit of a hobby horse for me so you're going to get my rant on that, later.
The short answer no, I don't hear any channel difference. But of course I have 2 amps in kind of a funky room so I have 4 power tubes and two input tubes and I'm pretty sure whatever tube differences there are tend to average out and I need to tweak the speaker placement anyway to get the best imaging. Speaker tweaking is an underrated solution to any balance problem in general IMO.
A little longer answer is I've had tubes for a long time and my experience is tubes need to be pretty bad before you can actually hear a difference in channel balance. My advice is if you want to try different power tubes for your UFO I wouldn't hesitate to buy a pair of tubes for Langrex and see what you think. I've tried lots of different 6P15P tubes , a few EL84/6P14P types. Several different EL83 tubes (with my custom made adapters that maintain the Hazen grid mod), and EL822/821s. Of all of these I think the EL822/821 sound the most different, in a good way, from the Decware stock tubes, but to be fair, I'm in the minority that anything sounds better than the Decware stock tubes, except for the Cryotone tubes and those are too much for my Scottish Heritage. Just be sure to give them plenty of time to burn in, at least 30 hours. Most of mine sounded pretty rough out of the box.
Now comes my rant about tube "matching" which you are free to ignore
.I feel like most of what people call tube matching on the internet is a bit of scam, because most tube testers are designed to tell if tubes are bad, not if they are matched (or good). The engineers at Hickok, HP et. al. needed to pick one operating point from the whole phase space of possible currents and voltages to test at to determine if the tube needs to be replaced. That is a nearly impossible problem though by and large they have done a remarkable job solving it. Is that operating point anywhere near the operating point in your amp? Who knows, but probably not. And what does vendor XYZ think "matched" actually means, 5%? 10%, 20%? again who knows. I've had a tube tester for a long time, and tested a lot of tubes, and at first I would totally geek out over "matching" but the more tubes I tested the less I found any real correlation between test results and audio performance. I still test tubes, to be sure they don't have shorts and to confirm I'm getting what I paid for, and I still note the Gm value, because why not, but to me consistent Gm values between tubes is more a sign of manufacturing quality then quantitative matching, although well made tubes will all preform the same. And this whole discussion assumes your tube tester is properly calibrated, which is a whole other issue.
Now, some places, like Decware, have much more sophisticated tube testers that can test tubes over a variety of operating points and can actually match tubes. But that is the exception, and by a wide margin. My feeling is tube matching is important for push pull amps, but of course Decware amps have meters and adjustment pots so you can match mismatched tubes within reason. Single ended amps are a lot more forgiving. I don't stress out over tube matching, but if that is important to you buy your tubes from Steve cuz his matched tubes are really matched.
This ends my rant, I'm very interested in what you think if/when you get some of these tubes.