I’m looking to add a tube amp to my set up, I’m currently using a T1 2nd with a Schiit Asgard 3 w/ Multibit DAC. I had been considering the Eufonika H7 (from ebay) over the BHC as I don’t know jack about soldering and would probably screw up 100% sad non-American noises, it’s priced at £299.
However, I just stumbled upon this listing on a local second-hand platform: the CypherLabs Sustain84 Mini, and I looked it up and it’s originally priced at $1,200 USD (?) or once $899 on sale on Drop, but I haven’t found many reviews on it. The seller is selling it at less than a quarter of the price (roughly $200 USD). Should I go for it? Or should I stick to my original plan in getting the Eufonika?
Any advice would be much appreciated!
I doubt your going to find anyone with direct experience with it, so you’ll have to go with the 3 or 4 reviews of it that are around.
I will point out it takes ECL84’s and not EL84’s and they aren’t interchangeable.
They aren’t a commonly used audio tube, but that usually makes the NOS ones very reasonably priced.
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Thanks, so I take it that it would be more difficult to roll tubes with the Cyphers?
You’d have to look what’s available.
You wouldn’t necessarily have a lot of choices, depends how many manufacturers made them, I think the ECL84 was intended as a TV tube, in which case there are probably lots of them around.
But the downside of that is because of limited demand they can be harder to find.
There is nothing wrong with using a TV tube in an audio amplifier, but you’d want to make sure you could source them or equivalents (6DX8 I think) from somewhere.
I’d do a quick search on Ebay, and see what shows up.
The price is right, I’d probably take a risk, if I were looking for something.
I’m personally not huge on rolling, good amps tend to be good amps with any decent tube, rolling can be fun, but it rarely makes a bad amp good.
They probably originally shipped with NOS tubes, and given the lower cost of these sorts of valves the manufacturer likely had the choice of valves, so I’d find out what it shipped with and go with those for a while.
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