I've had better day's! Here's why:
The
Thomson 6080 is a personal favorite of mine. It's a clean, clear, airy, wonderful sounding tube that brought me a lot of joy! So I've recommended it to a few people.
Recently there's been various reports online (and offline) about the ones coming from sellers in Eastern Europe not functioning as they should.
Six of those found their way to me and i've had some fun with the testers today, checking them out.
They are supplied in HUGE boxes with some labels and a sticker on top. You could throw these of your local apartment building without anything happening to the tubes.
In the testers i couldn't detect any short or gas, so that's good. When required to supply any current at all, just about nothing happened.
In a transconductance tester where 7mA/V is the nominal NOS value, the best got up to 2mA/V.
Here's a picture of the line-up.
Luckily i had one good sample from my own collection to listen to!
Unfortunately, that one had sort of a bad interaction with my floor
(hence, the bad day).
So it was dissected for the sake of curiosity.
Here's a view on one half:
- The coated heater wiring
- The cathode wherein the heater wiring lives
- The grid wire in nicely even spacing
- The anode plates with a large surface area for cooling
- All is suspended in a rigid mica construction seen on the previous image.
It's no Thomas Mayer picture quality (it's a phone!), but i hope you guys enjoyed it anyway!