Since Ray Tubes launched, one topic has kept coming up: NOS. People love the sound of our current-production tubes so much that finding vintage tubes that measure up has become increasingly difficult. The community kept asking for NOS options that were reliable, properly tested, and backed by someone they trust, rather than auction listings, mystery sellers, and “as-is”.
I love that you included CV6 in your offerings - they blow every 6SN7 I’ve heard out of the water!
How does the matching work for listings that don’t offer pairs such as the Philips EL84? If I add two to my cart, will they be matched?
Are the tester results marked on the box or printed out with the tubes? This is nice to have when one of a pair dies and I need to find a match from other tubes at my disposal.
Are you able to list the date ranges on the tube listings as well? One of the most frustrating parts of shopping for tubes is scrutinizing eBay photos to find date codes that match the tubes I’m looking for. Decade is a big search keyword for NOS tubes like these, so it would help with discoverability as well.
For EL84, we made a mistake and didn’t add the matched pairs. We have the tubes already matched. If you add two, we’ll make sure to send you a matched pair. Matching is done based on values of test results for the plate current and transconductance
The test results are marked only on the box. Each tube has a serial number you can refer to as well and we have the data catalogued at our end too
Interesting point on the decade side of things. Let me see how best to do this. Since we are not creating new listings for each tube like on eBay, we might have to look into this and see how best to manage it - cc @Sean@tom_at_apos for thinking on this and seeing how we can make this happen