Gramophone Dreams #48: The Venus Tube, Western Electric’s 300B

I would now be a prosperous gentleman had I been a clever fellow during the 1980s and held on to some of those Western Electric 300B vacuum tubes I used to buy for nothing and toss around casually (footnote 1). Unfortunately, I have no talent for acquisition or hoarding.

I remember once driving down to North Carolina with my Eddie Electric business partner, Ryoichi Kimura. We were going to an old farm hidden at the end of a long gravel road. The guy who owned the place employed teams of teenage boys in white vans to travel the country gathering Altec and Western Electric gear from abandoned small-town movie theatres.

As we navigated the farm’s rutted lane, I heard gunshots. I spotted a group of shirtless boys with trucker hats and pistols. One was aiming what appeared to be a .45 caliber Colt Buntline. They were sitting and standing and laughing, drinking 40-ouncers while lounging around casually in some red-upholstered theatre seats stuck at odd angles in the weedy dirt near a sagging barbed-wire fence. I couldn’t tell what they were shooting at, but as I walked up and said “Howdy” I noticed at least 20 Western Electric 300B tubes tied to the fence with wire. All but three were shattered.

A few hours later, we were driving home with that frontier Colt laying between us on the seat. Next to it was an RCA 77A ribbon microphone and a cool-looking Nikon M rangefinder camera. In the trunk was a cardboard box with about 50 loose 300B “discards,” three WE 555 receivers, and, the prize of our journey, one unopened case of new old-stock (NOS) Western Electric 300Bs.

As I was paying for that long-barreled Colt revolver, I asked the boy why they were shooting 300Bs. “Don’t you have any tin cans?” I asked. He looked at me like I was stupid. “What do you care?” he said. “They’re used!”

Two of those loose “300B” discards, which we got free, were in fact engraved-base 300As made around 1933. Sadly, both tubes tested unusably low on my WE tube tester. I had never seen a 300A before, so for fun, I put the pair in an amp. Despite the bad measurements, they sounded richer of tone and denser of texture than the 1954 300Bs they replaced. I enjoyed what those 300As were doing so much that I left them in—for two years. Then I gave them to a friend. Thirty years later, they’re looking supercool and playing fine music in my friend’s system—or were the last time I checked.

What fascinates me most about old gear is how quickly an industrial object metamorphizes from its original, universally recognized usefulness to something alien and mysterious. As I study our material past, I am impressed not at all by the Darwinian cleverness of humans’ so-called progress. I feel no need to know what an object like the 25,000-year-old “Venus of Willendorf ” was used for (though I imagine it was a child’s “Barbie” toy carved as a gift by grandpa and not the mystical fertility symbol it’s usually claimed to be). What captivates my mind is an object’s raw physicality, the nature of its form, its shapes, colors, textures, density. How it reflects light and meets the eye. How it feels in the hands. If it is a gun, I want to touch its blued-steel barrel and hear and feel its shocking power when I fire it.

If the object is a hot, shapely glass-and-metal vacuum tube, I need to hold it in my hands and inspect its construction, then experience how it plays music through my speakers. To me, ancient, directly heated power triodes like the 300B are the Venus figures of audio history.

The Elekit TU-8600S
If you have an interest in Venus figures and audio archeology but don’t know where to start, just scout about for the simplest, sturdiest single-ended 300B amplifier with the lowest feedback and highest-quality parts. The Japanese-manufactured Elekit TU-8600R kit amplifier I reviewed in Gramophone Dreams #27 fits that bill nicely, which is why I chose to review it. I enjoyed the “R” version for two years until last summer, when Mr. Fujita, design chief at Elekit in Japan, collaborated with Elekit’s North American distributor Victor Kung (VK Music) in Vancouver, Canada, and renowned transformer-maker Per Lundahl in Norrtälje, Sweden, to create the new TU-8600S, an upgraded version of the TU-8600R featuring Lundahl’s new, super-premium LL2785B output transformers and a TKD 2CP601S volume pot.

The basic “S-version” kit costs $1880 without tubes (footnote 2).

My review sample included optional V-Cap CuTF capacitors ($95) and Takman 2% resistors ($65). To keep the Elekit’s price as low as possible, VK Music offers a starter tube set for $285. It includes two Linlai-made, Cossor-branded “Black Plate” 300Bs, one Gold Lion 12AX7/ECC83/B759 voltage amplifier tube, and two RCA “clear top” 12AU7 driver tubes. For only $2325 (and a few nights of screwing, bolting, and soldering), you can enter the upper realms of Venus-tube excitements. If you don’t want to build it yourself, assembly adds $275.

Compared to the R-version, the TU-8600S produces a more clarified, finely focused sound with more separation between instruments and choral voices. (These improvements show how putting a better output transformer on a tube amp is like putting a better lens on a camera.)

As some of you know, I’ve owned or used much more expensive 300B amps made by Shindo, Kondo, Komuro, Wavelength, Woo Audio, and Audio Note (UK). To my ears and tastes, this TU-8600S kit dances in the same ballroom as those luxury brands.

Tube rolling is modern living
It all starts with buying, or building, your first tube amplifier. Then the worrying sets in: How long will the tubes last? Will they get noisy? Will their sound change over time? How will I know when it’s time to replace them?

The vacuum tubes in your current-production amp may die tomorrow, sputter along pitifully for years, or work spectacularly forever. More likely though, those stock tubes will stay quiet and sound good-to-excellent for at least a few years of normal use. I recommend changing them only when you get bored with their sound or they fail completely.

The next logical question is, would more expensive, alternative tubes, new or old, make my amp sound more exciting?

Maybe. But if you are not pleased with the sound of your tube amplifier, buying theoretically better old or new tubes is not likely to fix it, because circuit design, power supply design, and transformer quality account for at least 80% of a tube amplifier’s sonic fingerprint. If your amplifier is a push-pull, class-AB, tetrode design with degeneration and nested feedback, that figure could rise to 95%, making tube upgrades almost impossible to detect.

On the other hand, if your amplifier is a single-ended, low- to no-feedback design like the above-mentioned Elekit TU-8600S, the Line Magnetic LM-518 IA, the Steve Deckert–designed Decware 25th Anniversary Zen Triode reviewed in GD46, or the Justin Weber–designed Ampsandsound Bigger Ben described in GD47, better-quality tubes, new or old, will likely yield improvements in sound quality and extended tube life.

How it started
Tube rolling—swapping one brand or provenance of tube for another, just to hear if or how the sound changes—is a relatively new pastime. It emerged when most European and American tube manufacturers began shutting down production during the 1980s. Before that, life was simple: We stuck with the stock Mullard EL34s in our Dynaco Stereo 70s, the stock Gold Lion MO-Valve KT88s in our H/K Citation IIs, and those Krispy-Kreme smooth-plate 12AX7 Telefunkens in our Fisher 500cs. Back then, amp manufacturers supplied the best tubes they could because they knew good sound and long tube life were essential to their success.

The Telefunken smooth-plate ECC83, aka 12AX7.

At Stereophile, I have never once questioned the sound quality of the stock tubes in the amplifiers I’ve reviewed. Even when I keep reviewed amplifiers for long-term loans, only rarely have I replaced a stock tube.

When I do, it is because the supplied tube went noisy or died. The first tube I replaced was the original, four-year-old (Line Magnetic–branded) GZ34/5AR4 rectifier tube in my LM-518IA amp. I replaced the dead original with an ancient, well-used Amperex “Bugle Boy” from a box in my back room. I expected some subtle but positive change in sound; I was startled by how much richer in tone the sound became.

Footnote 1: In 1999 Stereophile published a John Atkinson

Footnote 1: In 1999published a lengthy feature by Peter van Willenswaard that compared different 300B tubes.—

Footnote 2: The Elekit TU-8600S and the two kinds of Cossor-branded 300B tubes—the “Black Plate” and the WE replicas—are available from Victor Kung’s VKMusic. Orders can be placed by email or via the Elekit forum at diyaudio.com. Email: [email protected]. Web: vkmusic.ca