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hagtech wrote:

You are lucky to be able to bask in such luxury!  It is one thing to build an amp for yourself, constantly tweaking and upgrading.  Quite another to design a machine for public consumption, at which point things like reliability, repeatability, and manufacturability become important.  Hence, you need to understand every inch of a circuit, the voltages and currents, everything.  If listening was the only criteria, then these would not matter.

Yes, sure I understand it, the public consumption machine and a machine for own tailored needs are very different thing. I am very lucky that I do not do audio as business. Still, I was taking about different things – about the decision support and the ways to assess the decision’s rational. This is however totally different subject and we are way too far from the subject of this thread.

Since you use the 5E6P in your amp it would be very interesting with time to hear your observation how this tube ages. The relatively fast life-span is the only one thing that I do not like in this tube. I usually get around a year out of 5E6P driving it at 17mA and 200V. I do not know how much I will get out of 5E6P at 35mA as I use them in the single-stage amps. The 5E6P does not dies in a year and can works for years and years but I feel it is good to replace it after a year. I would wonder to what observation about the 5E6P life-span you will come across. Particularly, since you use that tracer tools I wonder if you will be able to found any objective parameters that would signifies that the 5E6P is ready to go. I measure current and cathode emission – not always objective, unless I keep a log file for each tube and monitor how it ages. It would be cool of I was able to tag the 5E6P with unique numbers…

One more thing, Jim. Looking at your amp I see the driver tube as very short tube, shorter then it should be. I afraid that you do not use 5E6P but 5E6P-E or 5E6P-I. The 5E6P-E is identical tune to the 5E6P but it is slightly shorter. The 5E6P-E is an impulse version of 5E6P-E and it should not be used. The 5E6P-E measures identically to 5E6P but has no good sound.

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