Hi
@hypnos1...I hope that
some day one of those Mazdas EL38s (or RT, Darios) appear somewhere, but so far I have not seen a
single one for sale...and I mean not only in fleabay, but searching multiple sites (including french ones)..nothing. Congrats for those collector pieces, they are
extremely rare, in fact more so than the EL39s !! Given their unobtainable status, I am very happy with the supposedly “second best”...the early Mullards “dark glass” EL38s, which in fact are
very close to the EL39s as powers...and perhaps a bit more open and lively.
And again, I am trying to draw a line between the performance of those tubes in Euforia/HP amp as opposed to Euforia/preamp, but this is not easy: having a good batch of tubes (and being dual purpose pentode/triodes) the sound of 4xEL39s or 4xEL38s in my power amp was so
vastly superior to anything that I have heard before, that you just
have to set up Euforia to exploit that...and
this particular setup in Euforia might be different from the one for purely HP amp duties.
The awesome 4xEL39s powers took time to “loosen up” (being dark and reserved at first) but after that the quartet revealed themselves as nothing short of “world class” with transparency, detail and tight bass. Extremely powerful (over KT150 levels) the amp pumped easily 90 w/channel or more. 4xEL38s (clear glass) are at a similar level, with a slightly “looser” bass but enormous detail and air. That kind of powers needed absolute resolution and transparency from the preamp, and that was 4xEL38s, or 2xEL38 plus 2xEL39s on Euforia. For refinement, 2xEL11 as drivers also worked really nice...
As driver triodes in Euforia, the EL38s “clear glass” are absolutely top flight...for my tastes, and combined with the 39s or 38s “dark glass” offer the very best sound of Euforia driving similar tubes in the power amp...great !