Hope everyone is enjoying the holidays.
Don't know how much interest there is in the 596 rectifier.....
Recently, I've been rolling through various drivers and output tubes to discover which ones match up well with the 596. In my opinion, this rectifier is fairly bright. It reminds me of my Fivre rectifiers (5U4G and 5R4GY), but I confess I haven't directly compared them.
A couple days agoi I posted about using this rectifier with 5998s and a gray-glass RCA 6SN7GT, and feeling that it sounded quite nice. But with further listening, I began to feel that maybe another driver could be better. However, in the end I couldn't find a driver that was dark enough to properly tame the brightness of the 596 / 5998 combination.
So I decided to play it safe and roll in some of my favorite output tubes, four Tung-Sol 6BX7, and a pair of #76 RCA single triodes. And I do believe I can live with this combination for quite some time.