Originally Posted by
Deal4Fuji
I love speakers too and often wonder why they aren't marveled at more. People just seem to take it for granted, but to me it's amazing how a paper cone suspended over a magnet and coil of wire can so perfectly reproduce sound. I love the huge old Altec Lansing & JBL theater speakers. Speaking of tubes my dad had a television sales & repair shop for years and I have probably 200-300 vacuum tubes boxed up we didn't donate just thinking they'd have some greater value someday. Any idea if the tubes most commonly used in TV's would be the same numbers used in stereo amps and guitar amps? I don't remember a Bendex brand but lots of RCA and GE's. I haven't looked in that box in 22 years so my memory's not so good.
"Perfectly" might be an overstatement. There are resonant and impedance peaks all over the place in even the best speakers, and cone distortion that causes harmonics not present in the source, but our ears don't seem to mind.
As for the tube collection, you've probably got a lot that are perfectly good, but won't fetch much because there isn't a whole lot of equipment using them. I'm into vacuum tube stuff (it inspired my username, and I'm composing my own response to this thread), and had to buy out a couple guys' tube collections to get some that I wanted, so I'm sitting on a bunch of NOS/NIB stuff that may never get used. When you get time and energy, here's a short list of tubes I can think of that would be desirable for guitar/bass amps, and hi-fi stuff:
Preamp: 6SN7, 6SL7, 12AU7, 12AX7, 12AY7
Output: 6L6 (+ any suffix), 6V6 (+ any suffix), EL84/6BQ5, EL34/6CA7, 7027, KT66, KT88, 6550
Rectifier: 5Y3 (+ any suffix), 5U4 (+ any suffix), 5AR4/GZ34, EZ81/6CA4
You could also thumb through the lists of tubes sold by online tube sellers to get a sense of what is still desirable. I feel a little bad for the tubes that aren't really used anymore -- some guys like to keep their brains nimble by designing new amps to use the oddballs in their collections.
