Topic: tube testing

[Lil Kim Jong-Il]

So I have these tubes and I have now idea how much life they have or how many hours they have on them.   I think they are probably OK but after reading Brians post about how good his new tubes sound, I am wondering.

Does anyone know about testing tubes?  Where can I get it done?  Does anyone here have a tester? 

[Liquid Meat]

Sometimes you can get tube testers on ebay. Now sure how to use them. You might be able to get more info from firebottles.

[Lil Kim Jong-Il]

My only concern about getting a tube tester is that they need to be calibrated and you need documentation for the tube.  I guess the documentation is probably on the web. 

Thanks for the pointer to that site.  There is some cooll ols stuff on there.

[BobW]

get a modern B&K and you'll be fine.
The real downside is that they're pretty big and clunky and you'll use it once every five years, if you're a typical audiophile.

[JackoRoses]

So I have these tubes and I have now idea how much life they have or how many hours they have on them.   I think they are probably OK but after reading Brians post about how good his new tubes sound, I am wondering.

Does anyone know about testing tubes?  Where can I get it done?  Does anyone here have a tester? 

I actually have this old ass tube tester, unfortunately I don't own anything with a tube so I have not yet had a chance to test it out. I don't know if it works or not, I scavenged it off some scrap guy who in turn took it out of this ladies home because she was getting rid of all of her husbands stuff.
If anyone has some old tubes they don't care about I can try and check into this thing.
I took it because I do wish to get some tube gear and I thought it would be nice to have.
it has a scroll wheel on it with a variety of tube info on it for testing. (not to say that it would have the tube info for the uses here I don't know..)

[Lil Kim Jong-Il]

All my tubes are good and I'm keeping them for now.  Good luck, mabey some other guys might have some.



Bob, thanks, I will probably get one of the B&K units.  I had one of their 10Mhz scopes for years (many years ago) and it was a great piece of gear.   It was still working when I donated it to a freshman EE student a few years ago.

I may not use it all the time but I'm mostly interested in using it to get a sense of the health of different tubes.  I have one quad of TS6550s that have known hours on them and al the rest are unknown.  I'm trying to get this other amp for a bi-amp config and I want to be able to test if the tubes are close to matched across the set. 

[JackoRoses]

mine is just a hickok 605

[Lil Kim Jong-Il]

mine is just a hickok 605

Thats a nice one.   I would like to get a hickok but for the amount and type of use I expect, I can't justify the expense.   If I knew a lot of people locally who would use it, I might but for me alone, not so much.

[cheshirecat]

actually have this old ass tube tester, unfortunately I don't own anything with a tube

You do in fact you have something with tubes... the Hickok 605 uses 2 rectifier tubes, i believe an 83 and a 5y3.

You might want to have that mamba calibrated, do a search for hickok calibration and you should get a couple hits, i believe there are 1 or 2 peeps who do this reliably and replace any bad parts etc.  Should fetch a few hundo on ebay once calibrated if you're looking to unload it someday.

[JackoRoses]

actually have this old ass tube tester, unfortunately I don't own anything with a tube

You do in fact you have something with tubes... the Hickok 605 uses 2 rectifier tubes, i believe an 83 and a 5y3.

You might want to have that mamba calibrated, do a search for hickok calibration and you should get a couple hits, i believe there are 1 or 2 peeps who do this reliably and replace any bad parts etc.  Should fetch a few hundo on ebay once calibrated if you're looking to unload it someday.

good info thanks