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Tube sales, 1955

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It is amazing how little reliable information is available on this subject. I would suspect that New Sensor's Expo-Pul plant in Saratov is probably the largest current producer - they make a lot of different types and it's hard to imagine that their revenue isn't at least in the low 8 figures.

Add JJ, Shuguang, PSVane (own the old Guigang plant), TJ (makers of TJ, Full Music, and Sophia branded DHTs as well as a number of common idhts), Takatsuki (Japan), KR, Elrog and EML to the mix and I have to believe they all gross enough to make it worthwhile to be in the business.

New Sensor, JJ, Shuguang, and TJ - Full Music have pretty extensive product ranges, the remainder are more specialized to generally DHT types only. (Audio of course only)
 
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Well, since someone in Hong Kong bought up like 40,000 of the best tubes off the $1 list at ESRC and Vacuumtubes.net, we don't have any choice but to buy Chinese tubes now.
End of Hobby soon.

Nope... This has been going on for years.

There are plenty of new non Chinese tubes out there, and a plethora of widely ignored Russian types of great merit - I just don't get it.
 
At ASP of $10, $20M won't rock nor roll too long for multiple factories.
There is also the problem of workers at these plants ageing out and retiring. I don't know how many young people are keen to get started learning how to build complicated, delicate, obsolete devices based on 100-year-old technology. It may prove hard to replace the workers who retire.

As far as guitars go, I think the writing is on the wall - the entire era of electric guitar is fading from music and the public consciousness, and valve guitar amps are fading even faster.

The dark horse is the tubes-and-vinyl crowd. As long as its considered hip to play vinyl through a tube amp, there will be people anxious to buy them.

Perhaps Edison-style original tinfoil recordings will become popular again, and the hipsters will move back to entirely mechanical playback systems with big morning-glory horns.

-Gnobuddy
 
My theory is that the market is over saturated, but the reason it doesn’t appear that way is due to the baby boomer crowd collecting / hoarding more than it requires- in other words, more amps than they can listen to or play guitar on. They have the funds, have the time and are looking to reminisce on days long past.

Once this generation fades out there will be a flood of cheap tube gear, but as now the new trend is portable / headphones / digital for listening and advanced digital emulators to replicate the sound of the coveted old studio and guitar gear, most of it will go for pennies on the dollar.

(When this happens, I’ll be waiting like a snake in the grass.)

I’ve met far more than one male over the age of 55 that singlehandedly has over 30 pieces of tube gear, not including vintage speakers and so on. Most are just restored examples on display in pretty cabinets.

So, I think it’s just a small handful of folks that are responsible for propping up the majority of current demand.

I think most of the tube manufacture in time will begin to lean heavily in favor of headphone amp applications.
 
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Nope... This has been going on for years.

There are plenty of new non Chinese tubes out there, and a plethora of widely ignored Russian types of great merit - I just don't get it.

+1

First off, avoid any components from China unless you can verify they are good. It's simply not worth your time and effort to design and build an amplifier only to scrimp on key parts like the tubes. I'd rather have fewer amplifiers with good parts than more amplifiers on the cheap.

Russian tubes can be very good value, but some of them have a wide spread in parameters.
 
Just trivia... to get a wild estimate of how many tubes are sold today?

Here is a quote from Shuguang Vacuum Tube Manufacturing:
"In 2005, vacuum tube factory is planned to reach revenue of RMB 23 million and strive to set a new historic record for fifteen years. Thumb tube production line is planned to extend production capacity of 520,000 pieces each year."

The way I read this

"planned to extend production capacity of 520,000 pieces each year"

is that they plan to expand production capacity by 520,000 per year!
 
...they plan to expand production capacity by 520,000 per year!
When I was a child, I planned to one day live on my own island, with a hundred friendly dogs and a library full of Enid Blyton's Noddy & Bert Monkey books.

That plan didn't quite work out, either. :D

I'm curious what fraction of people own anything using tubes. My guess is that it's less than one person per thousand in North America and Japan, and even fewer elsewhere on the planet.


-Gnobuddy
 
Of course this is well over a decade ago so who knows what the situation is these days.
When it comes to tube guitar amps, the Boss Katana, in 50 and 100 watt flavours, has really changed the game in the last year or two: https://www.sweetwater.com/store/de...na-50-50-25-0.5-watt-1x12-inch-cosm-combo-amp

While there have been plenty of somewhat affordable solid-state / digital modelling guitar amps for at least two decades now, they have almost always sounded so bad that only beginner guitarists with tight budgets (and maybe also undeveloped musical ears) would actually buy them.

The Katana amps seem to have changed that. They have turned some invisible corner that puts them on the right side of the "affordable price, good enough sound" equation for many guitarists. Joe Bonamassa and Derek Trucks are unlikely to become converts, but plenty of working guitarists playing at weddings and restaurants and coffee-shops seem to be happily switching to Katanas.

Here is a well-recorded video clip that gives one a taste of what a talented player can do with one of these amps. Pete, the player in the black shirt, was a former studio session guitarist: YouTube

That said, there is some reason to think that the twin fads for vinyl records and tube preamps to go with them, are probably selling more tubes than guitar amps are, these days.

-Gnobuddy
 

PRR

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..."planned to extend production capacity of 520,000 pieces each year"...

English is an awkward language for me, and worse for folks not raised in it.

While my editor mother would agree "what it says", I agree this is probably a single goal, their best since 1990 (when domestic tubes might has still been in production for Chinese TV sets), not an every-year goal.

BTW: the RMB 23 million may be like 6 Million US bucks. On a half-million (goal) tubes, that's $12 per tube. They do better than I feared, but there's other big bites on the pie.
 

PRR

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Another data-point.
 

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