Erock
Active member
I picked one of these up about a month ago, and just wanted to give some opinions for guys thinking about one.
I've been collecting tubes for about 10 years. Every time I used to try a new amp, I would immediately get new tubes if I didn't know how old the previous ones were. Needless to say, I've collected quite a bit of tubes over the years being the gear whore I am. I bought the VT1000 to test them, and it's worked brilliantly. It gives you a simple rating of whether the tube is good, worn, or failing, and a gain/power rating for the tube that can be used for matching.
I've only collected the tubes I thought might still be good over the years, so I only ended up with a few worn and failures, much less than I expected. One of the power tubes I found that failed was from a quad I bought this year and hadn't used yet. Some were on their way out as far as their gain rating, but most preamp and the majority of power tubes were very strong.
After testing and labeling all my old tubes, probably around 70 total, I started testing my amps just to see where tube life was. I've bought several brand new amps in the last couple years. One of them came to me with a bad tube right from the start, but it was crackling so an easy find and fix. Fast forward to last month, and I've found 3 bad preamp tubes from my new amps, coming up as worn. These are brand new amps made in 2013, from different manufacturers. It made a big difference in the way the amps sound, as they were all in V1 or gain stages. These tubes were working though, and just sounding crappy/worn. Without a tester, or randomly rolling preamp tubes, I would just think that's how the amp was supposed to sound. I wasn't even going to bother testing my new amps, but I thought I heard a tiny crackle when I was turning one up the other day. I had recently become unsatisfied with how the amp was sounding, and thought I was just getting over the honeymoon.
Moral(s) of the story, the VT1000 is worth it's weight in gold if you go through a lot of tube amps. Super simple to use, and it's worth the piece of mind knowing your tubes are good when you push them. It's also really nice to know where the preamp tube triode gain levels are, as I've found certain preamp cocktails I seem to prefer based on those levels. For power tubes, you can see which sets are going to break up quicker than others, and also which will work together matched for biasing.
The other thing that stands out, is watch out for todays tubes. I have found 4 new preamp tubes from this year that test as worn, with very low gain ratings. Three were in brand new amps, and one was in a set I bought this year. I only found 2 that tested worn in the over 70 I tested of my old tubes. The tubes are all OEM except JJ, but the others are labeled as PM, ARS, and whatever Splawn uses. I 'm not blaming the amp makers, as they all stepped up and sent a new tube, but it's scary how bad the quality is for brand new tubes.
I've been collecting tubes for about 10 years. Every time I used to try a new amp, I would immediately get new tubes if I didn't know how old the previous ones were. Needless to say, I've collected quite a bit of tubes over the years being the gear whore I am. I bought the VT1000 to test them, and it's worked brilliantly. It gives you a simple rating of whether the tube is good, worn, or failing, and a gain/power rating for the tube that can be used for matching.
I've only collected the tubes I thought might still be good over the years, so I only ended up with a few worn and failures, much less than I expected. One of the power tubes I found that failed was from a quad I bought this year and hadn't used yet. Some were on their way out as far as their gain rating, but most preamp and the majority of power tubes were very strong.
After testing and labeling all my old tubes, probably around 70 total, I started testing my amps just to see where tube life was. I've bought several brand new amps in the last couple years. One of them came to me with a bad tube right from the start, but it was crackling so an easy find and fix. Fast forward to last month, and I've found 3 bad preamp tubes from my new amps, coming up as worn. These are brand new amps made in 2013, from different manufacturers. It made a big difference in the way the amps sound, as they were all in V1 or gain stages. These tubes were working though, and just sounding crappy/worn. Without a tester, or randomly rolling preamp tubes, I would just think that's how the amp was supposed to sound. I wasn't even going to bother testing my new amps, but I thought I heard a tiny crackle when I was turning one up the other day. I had recently become unsatisfied with how the amp was sounding, and thought I was just getting over the honeymoon.
Moral(s) of the story, the VT1000 is worth it's weight in gold if you go through a lot of tube amps. Super simple to use, and it's worth the piece of mind knowing your tubes are good when you push them. It's also really nice to know where the preamp tube triode gain levels are, as I've found certain preamp cocktails I seem to prefer based on those levels. For power tubes, you can see which sets are going to break up quicker than others, and also which will work together matched for biasing.
The other thing that stands out, is watch out for todays tubes. I have found 4 new preamp tubes from this year that test as worn, with very low gain ratings. Three were in brand new amps, and one was in a set I bought this year. I only found 2 that tested worn in the over 70 I tested of my old tubes. The tubes are all OEM except JJ, but the others are labeled as PM, ARS, and whatever Splawn uses. I 'm not blaming the amp makers, as they all stepped up and sent a new tube, but it's scary how bad the quality is for brand new tubes.
