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drdna wrote:

KR Enterprises 2A3. Minimal mechanical resonance. Solidly built. Very good, even reproduction of music across the frequency range. There is minimal harmonic distortion. The HF, midrange, and LF are correct. The reproduction of the waveform is not as accurate, with some slight sluggishness in the attack and decay. This leads to a less delicate sound that can be "steely." This tube is engineered to compensate for the problems with the recording process and the artificial nature of stereo. This compensation leads to the audio sounding most like the original musical event in the recording studio. The sound in the mixing sessions is the same sound here now. Despite its defects, more than any tube, it opens the window to seeing into the musician's soul.

Back in the “Single-stage Melquiades vs. DHT amps” there Adrian made a number of very positive comments about very promising sound from the new production from KR Czech’s Enterprises tubes

http://www.GoodSoundClub.com/TreeItem.aspx?PostID=9466

http://www.romythecat.com/GetPost.aspx?PostID=9321

I have no doubts that they sound exactly how Adrian described. Furthermore Adrian’s feedback very highly correlated with assessments I got from other trusted sources. However, there is a catch this story and I was thinking for a while to post it or not as the “catch” is none of my business. Anyhow, for the same to be honest with facts I decided that it worth to post it, not the last reason is because it is very much in line with the subject of the thread. This information came to me from a number of trusted sources but it is not my own information, so I take it for whatever it worth.

When Adrian reported about positive quality of KR tubes he was taking about the specific pair or pairs that he had and most likely that he bought some times in back. Unfortunately in the today’s standing of KR Enterprises tubes the situation is much grimmer. According to people who use a lot of KR Enterprises tubes they were out very fast, they have very high percentage of catastrophic failures and they do not sound as good as they use to sound a few years back. Reportedly a few years back the KR Enterprises tubes were phenomenal, even better in some aspects then the older tubes. A couple years back the gentlemen who found company and who was THE KR man passed away and the torch was taking by other person, presumably his wife. According to the people who had a lot of dealing with KR tubes the quality, both build and sound of the KR tubes, from that moment went way down  and according to some judgment today the KR Enterprises personnel is not able to furnish the quality hat older KR tubes had not has know how to do it.

I personally do not know how accurate it is but I know that KR Enterprises is constantly shrink the warranty coverage, from one year to 3 month and to 1 month - that is generally bad sigh. There are some other circumstantial evidences that indicate that what I was told about KR Enterprises might be very accurate. So, if somebody on a marker for the KR Enterprises remakes then pay attention to the tube vintage. It looks like the tube before 2004 might be OK and might be considered as from the KR’s golden time… Unfortunately, there are so many companies that follow the same path…

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