Tube Crisis? What Crisis?

If you’re one of the folks panicking about the future availability of tubes for guitar amps, you can take a breath. You can even stop paying through the nose and other orifices for tubes sold on Reverb and elsewhere actively taking advantage of your concerns.

Tubes are certainly not front of the line and have not been for a long time since the advent of the transistor, but they are also not dead yet. Many higher end guitar amplifiers still use tubes for preamp and power amp sections, and tubes are still a big part of high end audio, meaning a real stereo, not your phone and bluetooth speaker kit.

It is generally perceived that tubes are only available from Russia and China, partly due to low labour cost, but also considerably more relaxed health and safety initiatives. Tube manufacturing can be a toxic environment. That said, there are still tubes being manufactured of superb quality and in a safe environment in the United States by the company Western Electric in Rossville Georgia.

Western Electric has produced and still produces hifi grade tubes. Guitar amplifiers don’t use high grade tubes in general since guitarists like tube overdrive in preamps and the whole sag, push and pull from tubes in the power stage. Western Electric has stated that they are expanding their line to include tubes for guitar amplifiers.

We should not kid ourselves. The tubes will cost more than their Chinese or Russian pseudo competitors. Labour costs in those countries are less than in the United States. Also Western Electric’s history is high grade tubes, where all shipping tubes are consistent. This is unlike the import market where any two can behave very differently. Also Western Electric only uses top line components, compared to offshore builds.

These are not my words, they are the words of the Western Electric spokesperson. No candy coating, just the facts from their perspective. Their preeminent tube is the 300B. It is not simple to make and is rather expensive but it excels at what it needs to do. A 12AX7 is much simpler and less expensive to make.

There have been many threads about the frequency of changing tubes. In 40+ years of tube amps, I have had to change one tube. Even my old brawler, the Marshall Custom Super Lead Mark II is still on its original tubes from nearly 40 years ago. Don’t panic. And there’s no need to get hosed.

Thanks for reading and until next time, peace