Guitar Gear Forum

2tallmusic wrote: ↑Tue Sep 24, 2024 6:46 pm

nightflameauto wrote: ↑Tue Sep 24, 2024 4:52 pm On the little DSL at least, it's cathode/self bias, so unless something goes horribly wrong it's not too big of a worry.

That's right - with cathode bias you could perhaps take an increasing idle noise level as an additional indicator of the tubes aging/drifting apart

Can confirm, definite noise at idle that wasn't there previously.

My experience with tube life has been all over the place. I've had brand new tubes be dead immediately. Tubes last from weeks to years. I had a block letter 5150 with original tubes back in like 2010 that still worked, and that thing was played! Inconsistent at best. Don't think I've had a power amp tube failure, but I've had a TON of preamp tubes eat shit in 5150s over the years.

Tubes will last longer than the robots after they takeover.

Seriously, while I rarely keep a single item longer than my socks I must say I have never once had a tube die on me.

I've had bad tubes from a brand new amp direct from the factory but never had a working tube fail from just being old.

I've never had a power tube fail on me, and can count on one hand the number of times I've needed to change a preamp tube out of necessity

In fairness, if an amp stays in my possession for more than 3 years its probably an outlier, but there's been some notable exceptions with long tenures. I also almost never buy amps new either though, so it's not like these amps always have fresh tubes in them either. The KT66s that were in the ENGL Thunder I was rocking for almost 3 years dated back to the early HCAF era IIRC