I recently bought my first tube amp the little dot mkiii as I got a great deal on it used and was wanting to try tube rolling. I was thinking of buying either the voshkod 6ZH1P-EV or Mullard m8161as I heard they pair the best with the little dot mkiii. Where is a good place I can buy it for the best price?
Ebay. That’s where I got most of my tubes, just make sure the seller has good feedback and nothing looks off and it should be fine. Also you can look at the used market, avexchange and headfi classifieds have tubes for sale often.
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Is there anything I should watch out for when buying used tubes? Are they affected the older and more use they have?
Yeah they can be affected , but it takes a lot of heavy use, most of the time the ones that pop on the used market are lightly used and generally no issues from my experience. Regardless if you buy used from a individual make sure you use PayPal goods and services so you are at least protected and can be reimbursed if anything is off.
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Okay thank you!
I’ve had some mixed experiences with ebay and tubes in particular. Good deals can be had but you need to be careful and better know what you are doing, especially with the costlier stuff and if its coming from outside your country.
I have had better luck with store front sellers, especially twice when the tubes came in and i had problems and had to return one tube back each due to faulty build, and then would have been stuck with expensive unmatched tubes. YMMV, and you will probably pay a bit more, but that’s the way this game goes sometimes.
I also have had good luck buying direct from guys on audiocircle forums and head-fi forums. So far i have been fortunate and managed to deal with good people who took care of their stuff.
I’ll post some links of the good store front sellers shortly, in case you want to check them out too.
I noticed on eBay there were many tubes named the voshkod 6J1P-ev. Do you know if they’re any different from the 6zh1p-ev?
I largely agree with this, there are good sellers on EBay. But buying NOS is a crap shoot, and it’s easy to get one that has bad microphonics or a hum in your particular amp. When your buying just assume your going to have to return them. (Though IME you usually don’t have issues)
Also unless your using a high end amp don’t go crazy with very expensive tubes, it just isn’t worth it.
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Sellers I have purchased from:
https://upscaleaudio.com/
https://www.tubeworld.com/european.htm
https://www.audioasylum.com/scripts/d.pl?audio/faq/joes-tubes.html
http://www.cryoset.com/catalog/https://www.kcanostubes.com/http://vintagetubeservices.com/
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And, that’s where it is nice to deal with folks you can call and ask questions of. Can’t help you there, maybe someone will come along tha knows the answer. Good luck
Thanks for the help!
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