nick - thanks for all of your tube help, I'd be pretty lost without you 
Glad to be of assistance. Did you get your local dealer to match Triode's price?
yep! worked out very nicely actually...
now I need to find some output tubes.... not a lot of 12ax7 recommendations for my amp out there.
The EL-34s are actually the output tubes, they do the power amplification for this integrated, the 12a_7s do the preamp gain to get the signal up to something the power amp section can use. It looks like the integrated is built to use 12au7s (same as ECC82), they are in the same family as the 12ax7(ECC83) and use the same pinout but have a different gain structure. The obvious first step would be to pickup a set of 12AU7s, there are a bunch of different brands on the market, check out Ei, Sovtek.... I can't remember the other good small tube manufactures off the top of my head. Once you are comfortable with the sound, try a few NOS or almost NOS tubes, telefunken made some really nice tubes, also amperex, mullard, and even some of the US brands, I've had a good experience with RCA 'clear top's as a phase splitter... YMMV
For output tubes, if you can swing it and find a reliable source, try some NOS Mullards (xf2 dual halo getters if you can find em), they'll run you but they're a good solid tube. My second favorites are some Japanese Raytheon tubes I got my hands on (nice bass response on those), and in third were the current production SED EL-34s. I didn't like the chinese ones I tried, labeled Westinghouse, they were messy sounding, and I'm not a huge fan of the big bottle 6CA7s that are currently in production. But again YMMV, try as many different things as you can, some things will sound awesome (or 'interesting') and others you may immediately hate.
my .02
