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Western Electric revives U.S. vacuum tube manufacturing at AXPONA 2026, showcasing 300B and 308B amps and plans for new 12AX7 production: https://www.ecoustics

Western Electric revives U.S. vacuum tube manufacturing at AXPONA 2026, showcasing 300B and 308B amps and plans for new 12AX7 production: https://www.ecoustics.com/news/western-electric-axpona-2026 https://www.ecoustics.com/news/western-electric-axpona-2026

drfuchs 5mo ago
Kind of astonishing that they managed to retain the institutional / folk knowledge to be able to create a new vacuum tube product, never mind the machinery and inputs to manufacture them.
- mezzman 5mo ago
  Dalibor Farny is a great example of bringing nixie tubes back into existence purely by determination and deep research. https://www.daliborfarny.com https://www.daliborfarny.com
- Aurornis 5mo ago
  There have been multiple companies coming back to try to make small batches of vacuum tubes. It’s not a mysterious process that depends on arcane knowledge. It does require some tooling and process refinement, but the only real obstacle is getting enough demand to pay off the investment in tooling and process refinement.
  - cogman10 5mo ago
    It's basically the same process as making an incandescent lightbulb. Which is why vacuum tubes took off in the first place. It's more parts and more metal working, for sure. But really it's shaping and dealing with thin films and a vacuum chamber. The hard part is precision.
- ErroneousBosh 5mo ago
  In the 90s China bought the whole Mullard factory and shipped it over from England. If you buy cheap Chinese valves, you're buying Mullard ones which seem to be made to a higher standard than they ever managed in the 80s. Any two random EL34s out of the box will be a closer match than the crazy expensive "super matched pairs" that we used to buy.
  - thenthenthen 5mo ago
    Do you have some more info on this? Background, do they still exist? Where is the factory? I visited one older tube factory in China but it was converted to an art/consumption district.
adrian_b 5mo ago
Interesting. While I agree that for a powerful audio amplifier the only good choices are either a state-of-the-art switching amplifier made with gallium nitride transistors or an archaic amplifier with vacuum tubes (while the intermediate historical technologies between these 2 extremes are obsolete), unfortunately it is very difficult to indulge in the latter choice, when the prices of good vacuum tubes have become orders of magnitude greater than in their heyday, e.g. at your link the price for a matched pair of WE300-B is $1500 and for a matched quad $3100, while the price of a complete ready-to-use amplifier is too ridiculously high.
- boring-human 5mo ago
  Not to mention the cost of the gold-plated audiophile cables to wire it...
  - adrian_b 5mo ago
    Vacuum-tube amplifiers are not in the same class with techniques that are unlikely to have any perceptible influence on what you hear. Among amplifiers that are not perfectly neutral, vacuum-tube amplifiers subjectively seem more pleasant. Moreover, while an electronic audio amplifier made with modern components can be made perfectly neutral when terminated on a resistive load, i.e. it can reproduce any input signal without any changes except amplification at its output, once you connect loudspeakers at its output the amplifier-loudspeaker chain is no longer neutral, i.e. it no longer has a flat transfer function between the electrical input and the sound output and it is not at all clear which should be the output impedance of the amplifier as a function of frequency to ensure the least degradation of the sounds in comparison with the input signal. So it may happen that a vacuum-tube amplifier - loudspeaker system has actually a better overall fidelity than a typical audio amplifier that was designed to demonstrate a much higher fidelity on a resistive load (because thus the transfer function is easy to measure and correct, unlike the complete transfer function to sounds). In theory, one could make a modern amplifier reproduce any quirky behavior of vacuum tubes, e.g. a higher and frequency-variable impedance or certain kinds of distortions, but usually nobody bothers to do this, because it would be expensive and the normal amplifiers are good enough for the majority of people.

drfuchs 5mo ago

Kind of astonishing that they managed to retain the institutional / folk knowledge to be able to create a new vacuum tube product, never mind the machinery and inputs to manufacture them.

mezzman 5mo ago
Dalibor Farny is a great example of bringing nixie tubes back into existence purely by determination and deep research. https://www.daliborfarny.com https://www.daliborfarny.com
Aurornis 5mo ago
There have been multiple companies coming back to try to make small batches of vacuum tubes. It’s not a mysterious process that depends on arcane knowledge. It does require some tooling and process refinement, but the only real obstacle is getting enough demand to pay off the investment in tooling and process refinement.
- cogman10 5mo ago
  It's basically the same process as making an incandescent lightbulb. Which is why vacuum tubes took off in the first place. It's more parts and more metal working, for sure. But really it's shaping and dealing with thin films and a vacuum chamber. The hard part is precision.
ErroneousBosh 5mo ago
In the 90s China bought the whole Mullard factory and shipped it over from England. If you buy cheap Chinese valves, you're buying Mullard ones which seem to be made to a higher standard than they ever managed in the 80s. Any two random EL34s out of the box will be a closer match than the crazy expensive "super matched pairs" that we used to buy.
- thenthenthen 5mo ago
  Do you have some more info on this? Background, do they still exist? Where is the factory? I visited one older tube factory in China but it was converted to an art/consumption district.

adrian_b 5mo ago

Interesting. While I agree that for a powerful audio amplifier the only good choices are either a state-of-the-art switching amplifier made with gallium nitride transistors or an archaic amplifier with vacuum tubes (while the intermediate historical technologies between these 2 extremes are obsolete), unfortunately it is very difficult to indulge in the latter choice, when the prices of good vacuum tubes have become orders of magnitude greater than in their heyday, e.g. at your link the price for a matched pair of WE300-B is $1500 and for a matched quad $3100, while the price of a complete ready-to-use amplifier is too ridiculously high.

boring-human 5mo ago
Not to mention the cost of the gold-plated audiophile cables to wire it...
- adrian_b 5mo ago
  Vacuum-tube amplifiers are not in the same class with techniques that are unlikely to have any perceptible influence on what you hear. Among amplifiers that are not perfectly neutral, vacuum-tube amplifiers subjectively seem more pleasant. Moreover, while an electronic audio amplifier made with modern components can be made perfectly neutral when terminated on a resistive load, i.e. it can reproduce any input signal without any changes except amplification at its output, once you connect loudspeakers at its output the amplifier-loudspeaker chain is no longer neutral, i.e. it no longer has a flat transfer function between the electrical input and the sound output and it is not at all clear which should be the output impedance of the amplifier as a function of frequency to ensure the least degradation of the sounds in comparison with the input signal. So it may happen that a vacuum-tube amplifier - loudspeaker system has actually a better overall fidelity than a typical audio amplifier that was designed to demonstrate a much higher fidelity on a resistive load (because thus the transfer function is easy to measure and correct, unlike the complete transfer function to sounds). In theory, one could make a modern amplifier reproduce any quirky behavior of vacuum tubes, e.g. a higher and frequency-variable impedance or certain kinds of distortions, but usually nobody bothers to do this, because it would be expensive and the normal amplifiers are good enough for the majority of people.