Chinese tube amps

[dakayus]

Anyone purchased chinese made ones?

Also what are acceptible S/N for tubes and such? I'm using SS right now and I think I might just have to give tubes a chance. I just don't want to buy old faulty junk.

Also how often do the tubes burn out and such or what other things should I know prior to purchasing tubes?

Thanks guys

[Guest " "]

partsexpress now carries 2 models of asian tube amps.

price is about 750 or so.

[dakayus]

I was actually mostly inquiring about the quality. Chinese made things sometimes have pretty horrible quality.

[coltrane]

Good Evening,

I personally own and use a Shanling STP-80 Integrated tube amp. It's made in China. I have been very happy with it for almost two years without any problems. Yes there are some poorly made Chinese amps out there but there also poorly made American, British and European ones as well. I usually find that there are some very xenophobic attitudes in the HiFi world. People should not forget that most of the Reference and Synergy lines of Klipsch are manufactured in China. I have my amp hooked up to a pair of Heresy's and previously to my RF 35's. Sure it's not the best amp available but it allowed me to enter the world of tubes at a reasonable price. I can definitely tell you that now that I'm here I will not be going back to SS. Will my next amp be Chinese? Maybe. I will definitely upgrade to a higher quality one, if that happens to be made in China I'm fine with that.

Don't listen to other people's opinions when they have never had personal experience with a certain piece of equipment. Try it out and decide for yourself.

Good Luck

Coltrane

[joessportster]

for the price of the new chinese amps you can go vintage that has been gone thru and made as good as new and you dont have to worry about it sounding like crap, and losing your money... also a piece of refurbed vintage will hold most if not all the value you put into it, of course if you are rich and have money to throw away just try and see if you like what ever........ there is a wealth of information on this forum concerning tubes, if you are new to them you may try to audition some of the vintage stuff that members have ( that is if you are close enough to a member willing), as far as tubes lasting mine have gone over a year and are still like new, i saw craig at nos said he has over 6000 hours on a pair of tubes, i would suggest you try to contact craig at nos valves and get his opinion, or mark deneen at juicy music

Joe

[Guest " "]

dakayus

I have been looking into the JA30 DIY kits.....I would be intrested hearing anything that could rival the performance of it at it's price point.

One good thing about dealing with folks like partsexpress is their return policy....considering the reasonable shipping vs the shipping cost dealing with asian vendors.

In terms of buying a used vintage peice of equipment and going the restore route....even the folks who have established themselves as creditable and highly sought after upgrade and restore specialist call old equipment "rust buckets".

[NOSValves]

Good Evening,

I personally own and use a Shanling STP-80 Integrated tube amp. It's made in China. I have been very happy with it for almost two years without any problems. Yes there are some poorly made Chinese amps out there but there also poorly made American, British and European ones as well. I usually find that there are some very xenophobic attitudes in the HiFi world. People should not forget that most of the Reference and Synergy lines of Klipsch are manufactured in China. I have my amp hooked up to a pair of Heresy's and previously to my RF 35's. Sure it's not the best amp available but it allowed me to enter the world of tubes at a reasonable price. I can definitely tell you that now that I'm here I will not be going back to SS. Will my next amp be Chinese? Maybe. I will definitely upgrade to a higher quality one, if that happens to be made in China I'm fine with that.

Don't listen to other people's opinions when they have never had personal experience with a certain piece of equipment. Try it out and decide for yourself.

Good Luck

Coltrane

Very good post. It's not the country of origin its more an economic thing you can't completely cheat quality. The single most important cost involved in all tube based amplifiers of medium cost are the transformers. Most Chinese tubes amps in the low cost regions cut corners on these all important items. Amps like linked above get offer to me for dealership consideration all the time and buying them in lots of ten will result in my cost being $250 to $350 each. No way in heck even in China you can build a quality amp that cheap. This is why Coltrane enjoys his amp he paid the extra for a better quality made Chinese amplifier. Doing things cheap is all great and fine until you end up with something that is just simply cheap.

Craig

[anarchist]

I have a Chinese amp which was quite expensive and is held in high regard in Europe. It has been upgraded with Hovlands as well as a few other minor tweeks. I quite possibly would be interesting in parting with it once my new amps arrive but only because I have too much stuff. Its going to be hard to justify to the wife why I keep buying more audio equipment and aren't getting rid of any. (Already looking at building an HTPC now and/or picking up a Lexicon as well.) Additionally, it may be the best looking amp I have ever seen. You can buy a real one such as I have or you can buy a DIY version which cuts down on the inputs and will cost you approximately $800.00 to build yourself. It is not cheap. Many of the Chinese components, as others have mentioned, are cheap as hell. Buy something someone else is extensively familiar with and bear in mind vintage offers better resell value and may even appreciate while Chinese won't.

[seti]

The listening room in Hope featured the Cayin A-88-T integrated amp and Cayin CDP. The system sounded amazing many of us were pleasantly suprised. I personally didn'y like the looks of just not my cup of tea but the sound quality was great. Perhaps others that listened to the Hope system can chime in here. Although the Cayin is made in China it was engineered in Germany.

[NOSValves]

Although the Cayin is made in China it was engineered in Germany

IMHO that is marketing hype Cayin is a division of the spark group a 100% Chinese company. Ask Paul at Bizzy Bee he was the very first US dealer and a fairly good freind of mine. They're amps are indeed pretty good stuff. They were much better deals when they sold for about $600 to $700 when he was the main dealer. I used to recomend them to folks that just had to have brand new for under $1K but now they have priced themselves out of the sweat spot from a consumer view point IMHO by using huge high cost of sales marketing dealers. The amps have changed very little but the price has shot up to $1200 to $1500.

Craig

[dakayus]

I was just looking on ebay and saw some of the chinese made tube amps and was questioning their quality and seeing in another tube form complain about them. The schematic they had wasn't quite right and the parts were wired incorrectly. There were other complications and such as well and I know it isn't good to judge them all the same. But I wanted a good opinion from the klipschers out there to see if people had good experiences from them.

[dakayus]

Oh yeah has anyone here built a tube amp from scratch? *Meaning designed their own from the ground up*

[steve]

see posts above you. Craig, for one did! And very well received to boot! Many forum members own his amps, and have nothing but good things to say about them.

Steve

[TBrennan]

I owned a couple of Chinese made ASL amps and they were good; good sound and reliable. I also own a Jolida (which I think is in part Chinese made) which sounds good but started humming less than a year after purchase.

The Jolida was recently replaced by an ancient (early 1960s) Fisher 500B which was tuned-up by Terry DeWick in Knoxville. The Fisher beats the Jolida in terms of clarity and tonal balance and if memory serves also sounds better than the ASLs did. Howeve the Fisher is in rare condition, one can't count on finding one as nice as mine or getting as good a price, $100. With another $200 for DeWick's work I have $300 in the unit, cheap.

http://www.mcintoshaudio.com/dewick_repairs.htm

[edwinr]

The quality and reliability of the Chinese sourced tube amps are variable - usually tending towards the bad side of variable. You can get lucky though and buy a a good one. I didn't. Four Chinese sourced tubes later I learnt my lesson. Each amplifier developed different faults that were difficult to rectify. I lost good money on a couple - they developed major tranformer based faults shortly after the warranty expired. The distributor refused to fix them without payment up front.

[3dzapper]

Oh yeah has anyone here built a tube amp from scratch? *Meaning designed their own from the ground up*

Here is a good first time amp builder's project. The board is made by Shannon Parks of DIYTube.com and is of excelent qualityand great support on his forum. You'd probabaly need to add $300 up to $400 for transformers (or a Dynaco SCA-35 donor), chassis, switches, etc. This was the first amp I built from scratch when I retired. It is playing now on my Belles!-)

http://cgi.ebay.com/Stereo-35-ST35-DIYtube-Amplifier-Board-Dynaco_W0QQitemZ170053542307QQihZ007QQcategoryZ71545QQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

I went a bit beyond with mine adding off the board biasing and, since this picture was taken, a choke to the power supply.

Rick

EDit: Notice the original Blueberry in the picture. That one was number 0001.

[NOSValves]

Oh yeah has anyone here built a tube amp from scratch? *Meaning designed their own from the ground up*

Here is a good first time amp builder's project. The board is made by Shannon Parks of DIYTube.com and is of excelent qualityand great support on his forum. You'd probabaly need to add $300 up to $400 for transformers (or a Dynaco SCA-35 donor), chassis, switches, etc. This was the first amp I built from scratch when I retired. It is playing now on my Belles!-)

http://cgi.ebay.com/Stereo-35-ST35-DIYtube-Amplifier-Board-Dynaco_W0QQitemZ170053542307QQihZ007QQcategoryZ71545QQrdZ1QQcmdZViewItem

I went a bit beyond with mine adding off the board biasing and, since this picture was taken, a choke to the power supply.

Rick

EDit: Notice the original Blueberry in the picture. That one was number 0001.

Rick,

That was one excellent first project you did!! I really need to allot some time to an EL84 effort since it happens to be one of my favorite vintage amplifier tubes. Time is so hard to come by anymore. Man sometimes I long for the day's when this was still just a hobby........

Craig

[3dzapper]

Thanks Craig. I've got an old LK-30 laying around if you want some iron to play with,

Rick

[NOSValves]

I'm going to go a different route. I have a really nice 222B here and I'm planning to totally gut it and install my own circuit in it with zero tone controls. I will however be having new UL tapped iron wound for it and drop the pentode operation and make the amp triode/UL switchable. This of course is for my own use so no I will not go through that type of mod for customers well unless they have deep pockets its just not an affordable or a value added approach if you have to pay someone to do the work.

[IndyKlipschFan]

U might like this tube amp, and affordable too. $ 450.00 shipped, If I remember right?

http://norh.com/products/se9/index.html

Asian, but not Chinese.

Introducing the nOrh SE 9 Integrated Tube Amp

One of the arguments that has raged in the audiophile community is whether or not tubes sound better. There are many people who claim that no solid state amplifier can match a single ended tube amplifier for purity and clarity. I believe that I have heard very good and bad examples of both tube and solid state amplifiers. My general feeling is that there is an abundance of really bad sounding solid state amplifiers. One of nOrh's biggest achievements was to introduce great sounding solid state amplifiers for less money than the competition. Our first amplifier, the Multiamp has become a classic with many people still writing us if they can purchase one.

Even audiophiles will sometimes buy mini components for an extra room because they don't have the space or budget to put a high-end system in each room. nOrh believes we have a better alternative. Instead of buying a cheap mini component system, boom box or multi-media system, why not buy a single ended integrated amplifier instead.

Crazy right? Don't Single Ended (SE) tube amplifiers cost thousands of dollars each? The answer is generally yes until recently. Recently, a wave of cheap tube amplifiers have come in from China. Most of these have no name tubes, low cost components, and plastic sockets. However, nOrh now introduces a true high-end product worthy of the nOrh brand. As our nOrh customer's know, for nOrh, being good value isn't enough. We are not satisfied until we have set the world's standard of value for every product we sold. All nOrh products shall be the best products that can be purchased for their price period. Our first concern is building a product that establishes itself as world class in its price range. Our second concern is embarrassing audio companies that would charge a high premium for the same or less quality. We strongly encourage you to do some web shopping. Compare our quality and compare our prices. Once again, we have introduced a product that will leave other audio companies making excuses.

The SE 9 has two inputs. The volume control is manufactured by Alps. The switches are platinum counted. The sockets are ceramic. We use Electro Harmonix tubes instead of no-name Chinese tubes found in many lower priced tube amplifiers. According to the technical journal, Vacuum Tube Valley, the "...new EL34EH comes very close to the sonics of a Mullard EL34..." They go on to say, "The Electro-Harmonix tube is balanced throughout the entire music spectrum. Bass goes deep and is tight, mids are sweet and well defined and highs are detailed and extended." We selected the Electro Harmonix 12AX7EH for our drive tubes. The website www.thetubestore.com, reviewed the Electro Harmonix 12AX7EH as follows:

"These are not relabeled Sovtek 12AX7LPS tubes. There is a marked difference in construction and performance. The 12AX7EH has a nice balanced sound, a very low noise floor and excellent performance in terms of microphonics. The lack of microphonics may be due in part to the return of a shorter plate structure or better materials. I've had some samples that were tried in various amp stages. Pre-amps, tone stacks and phase inverters, a winner in every location, although I would continue to use a 12AT7 for reverb circuit drivers due to their lower gain rating. I have used the EH to successfully tame amps that defied all other attempts to kill microphonics and unwanted feedback. This tube is a winner, buy 'em and try 'em, they may be just the piece you've been looking for."

If you look at other Single Ended (SE) amplifiers, you will notice that the SE 9 appears to have an extra tube. That is because many tube amplifiers will use a 10 cent diode instead of a $12.95 rectifier tube. We use the 5AR4 rectifier tube.

No competition to Klipsch speakers here, but I have heard the amp and liked it a lot. A few years ago, a lot of them were used with older Heritage with good reviews.