WAF . . . Wife Acceptance Factor.
If she saw you with 2 stereos before you were married, it is OK, you get more stereos.
If You saw her with 10 pairs of shoes before you were married, it is OK, she can get more shoes.
The three words a husband most fears to hear:
"Notice Anything Different?" . . . which means you did Not notice.
Do Not guess what is different, you will be Wrong, and now you are Really in Trouble.
If she saw you with 2 stereos before you were married, it is OK, you get more stereos.
If You saw her with 10 pairs of shoes before you were married, it is OK, she can get more shoes.
The three words a husband most fears to hear:
"Notice Anything Different?" . . . which means you did Not notice.
Do Not guess what is different, you will be Wrong, and now you are Really in Trouble.
My current speakers, amps and line stages....
SE CV9 amp, 26 input, Sony Tamradio OPT, separate PSU
SE EL12Spez amp, 26 input, NP Acoustics amorphous OPT, separate PSU
SE EL12 amp, 26 input, Tomiko OPT, separate PSU
SE EL12 amp, 28 input, LL1682 OPT, separate PSU (for sale)
Leak Stereo 20 - under modification
PP EL84 or other output amp, not built yet.
2 pairs of Mission 761 speakers
2 pairs of Wharfedale Programme 30D speakers
Aluminium cabinets and drivers for a future build.
SE CV9 amp, 26 input, Sony Tamradio OPT, separate PSU
SE EL12Spez amp, 26 input, NP Acoustics amorphous OPT, separate PSU
SE EL12 amp, 26 input, Tomiko OPT, separate PSU
SE EL12 amp, 28 input, LL1682 OPT, separate PSU (for sale)
Leak Stereo 20 - under modification
PP EL84 or other output amp, not built yet.
2 pairs of Mission 761 speakers
2 pairs of Wharfedale Programme 30D speakers
Aluminium cabinets and drivers for a future build.
I’d be a dead man! It’s like picking a favorite child! That being said, it’s either my first or my latest one. Notice I didn’t say last one, there will be more! I’ve got plans to design another KT150 SET with DC heaters and some yet unknown output transformers. I’ve got to start selling these things as I outgrow them or I’ll be buried in them. I think a tube phono preamp might be next.
That puts a finger on something important: addiction. Tubes are addictive, more than anything else in this hobby I'd say.
Over the last few years I've quit drinking, quit smoking and lost 50-60lbs just by sheer willpower. If anyone hears me talk about quitting tubes, you can rest assured I'm talking sh*t
The GU50 is still in the dream stage! I’ve got two tubes and sockets for them so I have to use them, right? I think there’s a law about that. I’ve been told they are great sounding tubes but I have yet to hear them. I like the concept of the knob on top to replace them during flight!
I haven't been in the hobby long enough to be proud of one of my builds yet. But I do have the tube collecting disease, I think its upwards of 6,000 tubes now, from swap meets, ebay, other sellers. Here is my tube collection beginning to be sorted by type and size into flip top literature mailer boxes 3, 4, 5 or 6 inch high boxes. I dont distinguish the filament voltages of the same tube. As I have time I count the quantity of each tube number in each box of each type and write them on an index card of that box. Thank god for basements and a traditional wife who understands that men own the basement.
All of them as compactly stored as I could boxed by distinct element configuration, height and roughly power vs voltage rated, knowing that much gets me to the right box, then an index card on each box gets me to the right tube:
Beginning to organize them as such:
All of them as compactly stored as I could boxed by distinct element configuration, height and roughly power vs voltage rated, knowing that much gets me to the right box, then an index card on each box gets me to the right tube:
Beginning to organize them as such:
I am reminded of the joke ...
Two guys sitting in the waiting room of a psychiatrist.
One says, "oh dear, a long wait. What are you here for?"
The other says, "Weeell ..... I like sausages."
"Sausages! Sausages? That's not a problem, I like sausages too!"
"Oh great! How many do you have in your collection?"
Two guys sitting in the waiting room of a psychiatrist.
One says, "oh dear, a long wait. What are you here for?"
The other says, "Weeell ..... I like sausages."
"Sausages! Sausages? That's not a problem, I like sausages too!"
"Oh great! How many do you have in your collection?"
Same here.I stopped believing the tale of the unhappy wife a long time ago... 😂
They actually couldn't care less, one way or the other, this is just an excuse for (further) nagging, they never ever actually leave.
Don't ask 🙄
You need much worse than a hobby for that, which is not even competition.
Try another fine Lady, specially if 10/20 years younger, and you'll be seeing the outside of your house door in seconds 🥴
Warning, attempting to guess which "stuff" you will keep and which stuff you will never use is futile. At least keep a few of anything that might fit into anything that you might be interested in say 10 years or more. down the road.
I started building guitar and HiFi amps as a kid in the 60's. Back then a short trip to the trash dump brought you to hundreds of discarded TV sets from the 50's and earlier. I showed up with a bag full of tools and left with whatever I could carry home on my bicycle. Tubes, transformers, anything that might make something loud. In 1973 I got a job at Motorola where free silicon was a sample request form away, so most of my loud things were powered by silicon based life forms. A chance encounter with an old Scott tube stereo (I traded a car for it) got the Carver and Phase linear stuff voted right out of my stereo rack. I realized that most of my guitar playing friends were right, tubes did sound so much better when cranked LOUD at least in the late 1990's.
I get a call from an old friend who was a surplus equipment dealer and lived about 200 miles away. He was asking for help cleaning out a large abandoned warehouse and said that "I could have all of the tubes, there were lots of them." Four weekend trips pulling a U-Haul trailer behind a car with both stuffed to the max later and I have about 100,000 loose unboxed and unsorted vacuum tubes randomly stuffed into boxes, barrels, bags and anything that would hold them. That conservative number was based on size of the boxes and counts of a couple boxes, so there could have been more. It took about 5 years of nights and weekends to go through them. About half were junk, broken, corroded or useless to anything I would do. Like, what would I do with a thyratron rated for 5000 volts? How many 6AL5's do I need? I had over 100 pounds of them! I spent an afternoon shooting them against the warehouse wall with a sling shot just to hear the pop. About half of the tubes were trashed, given away, traded, or sold as they were sorted.
Some of the obviously bad tubes got worse just for fun. Ever see a Blu-Ray vacuum tube? Some unique and unexplainable oddities were found. These tubes originated from a dealer who bought up a bunch of military "spares," parts, modules, and pieces of larger equipment that were obsolete. He stripped them and sold the metal for scrap and warehoused a lot of the parts. My friend bought it all for the aircraft engine parts. I got the tubes and the rest went to trash. These were spares. I found a 6AG5 vacuum tube with a spare heater inside. On the same day of sorting, I found another. What are those odds.
I also found some gems that are the reason that the Tubelab TSE and TSE-II use a WE417 / 5842 for the driver. They worked the best of any of the zillion tubes I tried.
Eventually I had two 10 X 20 warehouse bays stuffed with sorted tubes in trays on shelving.
Fast forward about 15 years and it becomes apparent that my engineering career at Motorola is coming to an end. We would soon move out of the expensive and crowded craziness that was South Florida to someplace cheaper and more laid back. What do I do with thousands of vacuum tubes? Hamfests came and went, and tubes were sold, traded and given away. I even traded a Volvo wagon full of mostly metal cased radio tubes for a guitar. About a month before move time I started calling friends, bring the biggest car, truck or van you have, and I'll give you lots of free stuff. I even gave away my guitar amps including a couple pricey classics. Even so, about 500 pounds of transformers went to a metal scrapper. Best guess it that 5000 to 10000 tubes got moved up here and stored in an abandoned mobile home that is on our property.
I often go looking for a tube that I know I had. Sometimes I can find pictures of a bin full of them that I took as we were cleaning out the warehouse bays. It seems that they didn't make the trip here, and then I find a box or bag full of something and wonder why they were here. What was I thinking? I have found 4 bags full of 6AQ5's and I haven't used a single one in 10 years. I have bought 2 or 3 tubes from an online vendor just to see if they would work in an idea I wanted to try. Keep at least 2 or 3 of EVERYTHING!
