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One man’s quest to revive the great American vacuum tube
- bb88 4y agoAs a similar small startup tube production company is Dalibor Farny who is recreating nixie tubes. Their youtube videos are phenomenal on the attempts to make a vacuumed sealed nixie tube. https://www.daliborfarny.com/ https://www.daliborfarny.com/
- dymk 4y agoI came to comment about Dalibor as well - amazing youtube channel. Recommended viewing for anyone who loves home-ish-scale, high-quality manufacturing: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxL4ElboiuA https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=wxL4ElboiuA He's got to be one of the world's experts on nixie tube manufacturing, at this point.
- timmg 4y agoOh wow. I just came within millimeters of impulse-buying one of his clocks: https://www.daliborfarny.com/product/puri-nixie-clock/ https://www.daliborfarny.com/product/puri-nixie-clock/ For $1700, I might think about it first :/
- exmadscientist 4y agoThe Zen was my birthday splurge several years back. It's one of the few indulgences I didn't quickly forget about and actually have in my daily life, much less genuinely like and appreciate. No regrets. They were somewhat cheaper back then though.... And one of the tubes is acting funny (slowly fading from the bottom), which I should probably do something about. But it seems like it's stabilized, so maybe I can keep on ignoring it!
- asddubs 4y agofading at the bottom usually means the tube is leaking and will only get worse over time, so you should warranty it. fading in general (especially places other than the bottom) can also be cathode poisoning, which is reversible.
- exmadscientist 4y agoI've been afraid of that, yeah. Fortunately I'm an EE these days and so swapping out a tube is pretty easy, when I finally get around to it :)
- bb88 4y agoYou know. Life and money are only temporary in this universe. If it becomes a hand me down to your kids, well that makes it even more special. I have some stock that I'm going to sell soon, and one of the things I'm buying (besides a car) is one of his nixie clocks. They'll be timeless decades from now.
- bregma 4y ago> They'll be timeless decades from now. Hopefully not.
- 8f2ab37a-ed6c 4y agoAmazing aesthetic, but absurd price. I realize that they are the only game in town, but still.
- belter 4y agoLooking into the skill, materials, manual labor, novel techniques, and quality finish that goes into it, I would argue this an expensive, but somewhat fairly priced product.
- asddubs 4y agoactually, millclock is also making new nixie tubes now, so they are one of the two only games in town. nixie manufacture at a non-industrial level is pretty involved, so each tube has to pay for someone manufacturing it for several hours, and that's before you even get to material and research costs. I do wish these tubes were more affordable, but the price is unfortunately pretty understandable.
- lobe 4y agoLove Dalibor's work. I have the Puri clock, and it is a real statement piece that wows people. I didn't get it for that, I just got it half because I loved the aesthetic and half I wanted to support someone doing something that unique (one of those things I would personally like to do in a life after software). On the plus side, Dalibor himself has been extremely helpful in answering questions and resolving minor issues with the clock (both software issues, both quickly resolved). It is undoubtedly a hard to justify luxury item, but if on the fence you should buy it. It is more impressive in person than I imagined.
- nielsbot 4y agoHas anybody seen Steve Wozniak's nixie tube wristwatch? https://www.timesticking.com/steve-wozniaks-nixie-watch/ https://www.timesticking.com/steve-wozniaks-nixie-watch/ (Googling it, I discovered Nixie tube watches are "a thing" and you can buy them)
- belter 4y agoNot only they are gorgeous, you support Ukraine at the same time... https://nixoid.store/ https://nixoid.store/
- bb88 4y agoI saw that maybe a decade ago? It's amazing. There are some really pretty ones one etsy. The hand made ones are also instant heirlooms, particularly if their batteries are easily replaced.
- teddyh 4y agoMy guess is that people are buying tubes because of the impression that they are rare and hard to get, and owning one is a privilege, which makes people accept a high price. If a domestic factory starts cranking out tubes, even with a similarly high price, the impression of rarity and unavailability won’t be there, and I suspect that people then won’t buy them.
- Turskarama 4y agoI don't know that that's quite it, people like them because they have a different sound. Objectively speaking, they do a worse job of recreating audio, but they do it in a consistent way that people like.
- teddyh 4y agoIf people only liked the sound, I would assume that it could be emulated on the digital sound processing platform they already use. People buying tubes must be something else.
- elseweather 4y agoI dunno, man. At least with guitar amps the solid state ones _try_, but even expensive ones kinda suck compared to a tube amp
- charrondev 4y agoI haven’t been able to tell the difference for a while. I switched from a Marshal JTM45 to an Axe FX III w/ a big FR/FR cab and it sounds damn good and is a lot more flexible. The other benefit to the new modellers (which for the past 5 or so years have been really high quality) is they are far more versatile and weigh a lot less. Now the key is to invest in a good speaker cabinet, just like with a tube amp. Unfortunately there aren’t a ton of places where you can test drive them at least where I live. There’s another company that makes high quality modellers (Kemper) and they make a matching cab, but I’ve never seen one in person.
- crims0n 4y agoThat’s pretty cool. I had always hoped someone would do something similar with CRTs. A modern CRT would be killer for gaming and retro computing.
- ggm 4y agoArguably a CRT is just a highly specialised Valve anyway.
- idonotknowwhy 4y agoI've been looking into this. Apparently it's a lot more complex. 1. Couldn't be made at scale now due to regulations around the lead. 2. Seems like a lot of the knowledge is lost too. I found a factory on alibaba who can manufacture Crts with new old stock tubes, but their minimum order quantity is 500 and who knows what the quality would be like. Couldn't get them to do a "sample run" of 10 for me either
- mrob 4y agoWikipedia links a page from "Springer Handbook of Glass" [0], which shows a diagram of the typical construction of a CRT tube. The lead glass is only used for the sides and back, with barium+strontium glass used for the front. It looks like use of lead glass is only a cost optimization, and the whole thing could be made from barium+strontium glass. As there is no other technology that matches CRT latency and motion quality when used with fixed 60Hz content (e.g. most console/arcade games), it should be possible to sell new CRTs at high enough price to make this viable. [0] https://books.google.com/books?id=-ka9DwAAQBAJ&pg=PA1367 https://books.google.com/books?id=-ka9DwAAQBAJ&pg=PA1367
- systems_glitch 4y agoThe thing with that is, it's way cheaper to use what already exists. The "we need new CRTs" thing seems to come up all the time, when the reality is they're still readily available as long as you're not depending on them being free and/or available right this second at a retail location near you. Same reason we (Glitch Works) haven't done a new 8-bit ISA Ethernet board. They're still available for $5-20 basically any time you want one.
- pwpw 4y agoI built my own Bottlehead Crack tube amp [0] for listening to music with my Sennheiser headphones, and it’s absolutely delightful. It’s add such a nice warm sound. It also works on my Game Boy color to remove the annoying hum that you hear when plugging headphones directly in. Mine uses a 6080 tube, which it looks like Bottlehead has started to run out of. It’s great to see someone spend time manufacturing things like this for such a niche hobby that’s driven by passion. I wish more companies specialized in these things. I find myself spending too much time weeding through junk on Amazon to support my niche hobbies. [0] https://bottlehead.com/product/crack-1-1-otl-headphone-amplifier-kit/ https://bottlehead.com/product/crack-1-1-otl-headphone-ampli...
- systems_glitch 4y agoImagine how much you'd like something with less magic mojo marketing :P I worked on a bunch of Bottlehead products for a west coast audio shop during college...that they charged as much as they do for what's in there was mind-blowing. My favorite was the "stepped attenuators" they used to sell, Rat Shack rotary switches and ten cent resistors.
- sockaddr 4y agoSeems like it’s “essential oils” for men
- actionfromafar 4y agoAt least Radio Shack rotors and 10 cent transistors don't make your dogs and cats go into seizures.
- tohnjitor 4y agoWhat's the story with the seizures?
- actionfromafar 4y ago
- kemitchell 4y agoI really enjoyed learning electronics through tube amps. But gee howdy are we better off not having big filter caps and badly grounded All American Fives around. The guitar guys are A/B testing their way toward modeling. I guess that leaves the Hi Fi guys. Nothing against fetishism or historical reenactment, but I'm not sure that's leaving much.
- kazinator 4y agoI play guitar thorugh an ADA MP-1 MIDI-programmable tube pre-amp. All the clean presets I use go through the solid-state signal path; no tubes. That shows you where I stand. Tubes are for the blatant distortion everyone can objectively hear. That effect is so undeniable that all the modern digital modeling equipment purposefully reproduces it, using specific amplifier names in the settings. (Why can't that modeling shit come up with something original and leave the tubing to the tubes? Hundreds of millions of transistors switching in two voltage levels, to simulate an evacuated glass bottle with a couple of electrodes. That's like using Postgress DB to construct a thread mutex. Abstraction Inversion: http://tunes.org/wiki/abstraction_20inversion.html http://tunes.org/wiki/abstraction_20inversion.html)
- aswanson 4y agoBecause people dig the sound.
- kazinator 4y agoBut it's just software/firmware. E.g. people dig the usability and reliability of Microsoft Windows, but other operating systems are still used at least for shits and giggles, right? I've not heard of anyone using anything other than tube amp models. Either that, or going to a guitar synth with a MIDI pickup to make it into a clarinet.
- aswanson 4y agoI have an algo based on some transforms that I coded back in the day for a university project, nothing whatsoever to do with tubes. Been meaning to parameterize it and run some guitar sounds through it. I'd bet it sound awesome.
- Blackthorn 4y ago> (Why can't that modeling shit come up with something original and leave the tubing to the tubes? Hundreds of millions of transistors switching in two voltage levels, to simulate an evacuated glass bottle with a couple of electrodes. That's like using Postgress DB to construct a thread mutex. Abstraction Inversion: http://tunes.org/wiki/abstraction_20inversion.html http://tunes.org/wiki/abstraction_20inversion.html) There are plenty of VST waveshapers. Just...everybody wants to use them to reproduce tube amps and pedals instead of different distortion ideas. Hell, personally I can't even hear the difference between whatever different models of distortion people come up with anyway...
- rubychill 4y agohttps://archive.is/2KWv1 https://archive.is/2KWv1
- iainctduncan 4y agoWhat a lot of people miss when wondering why musicians still love tubes when emulations are so good now is: Tubes amps are repairable. Something goes wrong, you can fix it with soldering irons and spare parts. Many of us are sick to death of throwing out cheap microcontroller based crap. It's a hell of a lot easier to bring some spare parts on the gig than a whole damn spare amp, and tube amps don't depreciate to garbage in five years. (Good micro-controller based stuff is a different story, but amp emulators are not built like top of the line digital equipment.)
- Clamchop 4y agoCan you talk a little bit about how this balances with other tradeoffs? Solid state devices should be more durable and configurable, and cheap to replace in theory. And some parts in them should also be able to be fixed or replaced with a soldering iron and basic electronics diagnostics.
- systems_glitch 4y agoYeah but if you need to solder in a musical instrument tube amp, you can do it with a hot brick. Casual home tinker types can manage pretty OK on point-to-point stuff.
- newprint 4y agoFairly good, modern SS amp (like Boss Katana) have complex circuitry that requires a very knowledgeable tech who can diagnose and repair the issue. That can be $$$/h. Repair can cost as much as the amp. Guitar tech amp about repairing Katana: https://youtu.be/EPvon7zLdgw https://youtu.be/EPvon7zLdgw
- jcarrano 4y agoThat's because the manufacturer won't provide service manuals or schematics. Probably the thing itself is not designed to be repairable, but that's an issue with the product itself, not with the technology.
- 4y ago
- zw123456 4y agoIt will break some people's hearts to hear this perhaps, but way back in the day, around 1976, when I was at Bell Labs, we came up with a solid-state replacement for the 300Bs and other tubes used in repeaters (the word they used for an amplifier back in those days because it replaced a person who would repeat, a whole other fun story). But this solid-state replacement was called a Fetron, it used FETs and was plug compatible with the tubes. We had armies of people with asbestos gloves pulling out the hot tubes and throwing them in huge trash bins and plugging in the replacement Fetrons. We smashed 300B's by the thousands back then. Bunch of old junk! was the cry. BTW, the repeater used to be a person's job, mostly women, they would sit in a small both and a call from say New York would come in and it could not reach Chicago with just simple copper loop so their job was to listen to what the person in New York said and repeat it into the next loop and so on until it go to Chicago, the longest loop would be maybe 100 miles. Originally the booth was 2 feet wide, just wide enough for a woman to fit into. It was a repeater bay, with little side walls to isolate the sound somewhat between repeaters. This was before electronic amplifiers. One day, along comes an efficiency expert from HQ who figures out they can add a couple more repeater bays into the line up if you just shrunk it down by an inch to 23 inches. Then later, when electronic amplifiers came along, tube type of course, it replaced the jobs of all these women who were repeaters. Put them out of work. Later came the Fetron. But that is why bays are 23 inches wide to this day. Sort of like the old lore about railroad widths being the same as roman carriages,this was the lore passed down to me from what were the old timers then. Guess that's me now :)
- jpmattia 4y agoThat's an amazing story, and TIL: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fetron https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fetron Any pointers to the origin of "repeaters"? And thanks for making this old person from Bell Labs feel positively like a young noob. (was there in the late 90s). Edit: Wayback machine has the Teledyne spec sheet too: https://web.archive.org/web/20160227184512/http://hrsasa.asn.au/docs/Fetron.pdf https://web.archive.org/web/20160227184512/http://hrsasa.asn...
- zw123456 4y agoOh wow, thanks for that link! We had the old WECO handbook on tubes with all the specs and how to make them and they were tossing them and I grabbed one. I wished I kept more of that stuff.
- js2 4y agoObligatory link to "Hand Made Vacuum Tubes by Claude Paillard": https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzyXMEpq4qw https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EzyXMEpq4qw http://paillard.claude.free.fr/ http://paillard.claude.free.fr/
- exabrial 4y agoMy personal favorite is an EL34 in a single ended configuration being driven into clipping by a stratocaster. Fawk it's loud. But damn is it a beautiful sound.
- OldGuyInTheClub 4y agoWhitener's Western Electric website has a Technical Library section with some marvelous preserved historical documents. For example The Principles of Electron Tubes which describes traveling wave tubes, klystrons, and other devices still used extensively today. The Statistical Quality Control Handbook is still worth a read. https://www.westernelectric.com/library#technical https://www.westernelectric.com/library#technical Man, I miss Bell Labs.
- musictubes 4y agoI love my stereo tube amps and preamp. Not only does my system sound wonderful but I love tubes as objects themselves. These are the original electronics and I nerd out using them. Recently I got some 12j5gt tubes made by National Union. They were made for the military (Joint Army Navy, JAN) and had the date October 1942 on the boxes. I got a bit of a thrill out of the idea I was the first person in 80 years to see these. Call it nostalgia or whatever but actually using 80 year old electronics is just fun. Most of the tubes that have become expensive are the ones that guitarists swear by. GEC KT66 and KT88 along with Mullard EL34 have surged in value as the supply has dried up. In the audio world the most expensive tubes are the 300B and especially the original 300A triodes. While Americans were in the process of throwing out and destroying the old Western Electric tubes, Japanese audiophiles started buying them up starting in the 80s. A tremendous number of the existing vintage WE tubes are now there and in China. The current version of the Western Electric 300b tubes have a very good reputation but there are other boutique manufacturers in Germany and Japan that also make highly regarded versions. I own 400+ tubes. Like I said, I like them for their history and as amazing objects. I don’t own any really expensive ones but I have had fun finding alternative tubes for my equipment that are less expensive but have the same sonics as the more expensive ones. For example I can use tubes with heater voltages other than the common 6v. I have also done things like use a pentode tube converted to a triode. Lots of fun and it sounds amazing.
- petesoper 4y agoEimac, founded before WW2 but now some division of some corp, is the gold standard for amateur radio amplifier tubes and is still used by governments. They developed technical advantages while making a lot of radar tubes during the war and amateurs scooped up the surplus and later became regular customers and then commercial suppliers like Collins designed them in. They were part of Varian for a while and make modern very high power klystrons among other things.
- mdmglr 4y agoJoshua is a YouTuber who has a lot of great videos on this subject: https://www.youtube.com/@jdflyback/videos https://www.youtube.com/@jdflyback/videos Home-made CRT is worth a watch: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ESwj-VXjDtY https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ESwj-VXjDtY
- jimnotgym 4y agoFor UK readers it is also worth mentioning Brimar and The Great British Valve Project. It looks like they currently outsource, but their Twitter page is full of their manufacturing plant being set up. Brimaruk.com https://twitter.com/BrimarBob?t=YDFMlMM2JeKHwmLTrmtOZQ&s=09 https://twitter.com/BrimarBob?t=YDFMlMM2JeKHwmLTrmtOZQ&s=09
- Gordonjcp 4y agoA company in China bought the old Mullard factory and shipped it over, right down to roughly half of the exterior bricks.
- azalemeth 4y agoTubes are still sometimes used in specialised high power applications – typically broadcast TV, or for very high power RF amps for typically either military purposes or MRI scanners (my domain!) where you really want the ability to blat tens of kW of RF at a person for a very, very short period of time. They break. They get hot. They contain high voltages that can kill people. They're basically the definition of a nonlinear device. Yet for some reason, they're the best in their niche – if you want a tube amp that can work up to 112 kW, Eimac will sell you one [1]. Some of them come with wonderful descriptions like "The tube does not require a socket as it is designed to bolt directly to the chassis by means of the grid flange. Cathode and heater connections are made by bolting directly to the amplifier circuitry." Solid state (GaN / IGBT) are getting there but there are still new machines with tubes in being produced today. Of course, they have to (literally) warm up and are very annoying to work with – and can kill you – but, hey, valves aren't totally dead yet… [1] https://www.cpii.com/product.cfm/1/22/174 https://www.cpii.com/product.cfm/1/22/174
- analog31 4y agoThose things are works of art. Of course, 112 kW into 50 Ohms is something like 2400 Volts, so you're still going to get killed if it's solid state.
- datpiff 4y ago> They're basically the definition of a nonlinear device I don't think this is right. Triodes and pentodes have very linear operating regions. More so than a lot of solid-state devices. We make modern circuits more linear by using lots of active devices with negative feedback.
- azalemeth 4y agoThis is completely true and you're right – smaller triodes and pentodes do have a very linear operating region (Wikipedia has a nice example [1]). I believe, perhaps erroneously, that the larger, high power variants however decidedly have their "foibles" however – an example higher power curve is here [2]. There are plenty of linear operating regions. The trouble is largely that they're not going to have the same gradient! I realise it doesn't matter that much when you've designed the amp, but in practice I have wondered about e.g. 275 µs delay times (at ~50 MHz) that may well be due to amplifier imperfect phase responses away from the frequency they were designed to work. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:TriodeECC83Characteristic1.png https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:TriodeECC83Characteristic... [2] https://imgur.com/a/D622n2E https://imgur.com/a/D622n2E
- denton-scratch 4y agoVacuum tubes ("valves") are not American. They were invented by an Englishman, John Ambrose Fleming.
- dekhn 4y agoI'm not a tube guy normally (solid state forever!) but I do enjoy glow tubes (partially evacuated tubes that glow from plasma when turned on). I found an interesting project, "Build a Vacuum Tube Nightlight (http://www.grandideastudio.com/vacuum-tube-night-light/ http://www.grandideastudio.com/vacuum-tube-night-light/ and https://worldradiohistory.com/hd2/IDX-Consumer/Archive-Poptronics-IDX/IDX/90s/95/PE-1995-03-OCR-Page-0003.pdf https://worldradiohistory.com/hd2/IDX-Consumer/Archive-Poptr...). It's a simple circuit to drive the tube from wall power, and an enclosure to keep the tube safe. I learned that you can just buy nixie power supplies and adjust them to the strike voltage of the tube, which is a bit nicer than the custom circuit I linked. but be careful- you're either dealing with mains voltages or high DC voltage, both of which can be pretty painful if you make a mistake.
- TomMasz 4y ago“Tubes just distort things in a very pleasant way,” This is probably the best description of tube sound. Not that they don't distort, just that humans seem to like it when they do. If you A/B tube and solidstate amps at a level where neither is driven into distortion, they're hard to differentiate.