4 ms·
Makes (a small amount of) sense -- the only high-quality tubes I've ever seen were either manufactured in the U.S., Europe, or in various parts of the former US
by Kadin 15y ago
Makes (a small amount of) sense -- the only high-quality tubes I've ever seen were either manufactured in the U.S., Europe, or in various parts of the former USSR; Chinese tubes have a very poor reputation at least in audio circles.
Perhaps this is because nobody ever bothered to put a serious effort into outsourcing vacuum-tube production, in the same way ICs and microprocessors have been outsourced, leaving the remaining production still domestic?
Or maybe it's just that there are huge stockpiles of the things sitting around in the U.S. and they're slowly being sold off, both for domestic consumption and export, but the net result is an export of tubes? That wouldn't be hard to believe either.
- kamagmar 15y agoAccording to this: http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/big-shift-for-gas-guzzling-nation-fuels-are-top-us-export-oil-imports-still-worlds-highest/2011/12/30/gIQAw0A5QP_story.html?tid=sm_twitter_washingtonpost&tid=sm_twitter_washingtonpost http://www.washingtonpost.com/business/big-shift-for-gas-guz... we exported $37.1B worth of vacuum tubes last year. I could be wrong but that amount seems wildly implausible. Could the category actually be "Vacuum tubes, etc." where "etc" is semiconductors?
- ams6110 15y agoThe only things I really know of that would still use vacuum tubes are esoteric high-end audiophile amplifiers, and some "old school" guitar amps (Marshall, Hiwatt, etc). Is there really that big a market? Are they used for anything else?
- arctangent 15y agoWikipedia lists some other modern uses including (most unexpectedly) in particle accelerators: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_tube#Vacuum_tubes_in_the_21st_century http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vacuum_tube#Vacuum_tubes_in_the...
- stan_rogers 15y agoYou are overlooking things like magnetrons, x-ray tubes, photomultipliers, CRTs (which still have a lot of applications outside of the video display sphere), krytons and so forth. It's not all about diodes, triodes, tetrodes and pentodes.
- sliverstorm 15y agoOne of my professors told me a few years ago that tubes were still used heavily in high-power commercial radio stations. Could be dated info though.
- chrischen 15y agoI believe NORAD computers still use vacuum tubes.
- mikeash 15y agoMy money is on someone getting "facts" off Wikipedia or similar without doing any smell testing on the numbers.