Marvellous marvellous vacuum tubes!

The marvel of it's time...

https://youtu.be/sxxVDXIiz9Q

They're still a pretty amazing invention in my book. Just the idea of sucking all the air out of a tube of glass or metal to allow electrons to react freely with some chunks of rare earth metal is pretty mindblowing when you think about it. You start adding control grids and its like... YOU DID WHAT? Go science!

I was astonished to learn, during my RAF days that Nimrod maritime defense aircraft still used vacuum tube technology even in the late 90's. Two reasons were cited: - 1. The kit worked fine so there was no reason to upgrade. 2. Tubes are much more robust in the face of EMP Electo-Magnetic Pulse.

Earnest preppers would do well to keep this in mind when choosing between digital, solid state, or tube amps. One will be in a much better position to Rock On following a nuclear detonation with tube amps in one's inventory.

In the USA to the best of my knowledge sub miniature triodes are used in a lot of military aircraft to this day to shield our revenge squadrons from the EMP generated by large thermonuclear blasts in the event of world war 3. Which seems like a good useof public funds since I'm really going to be worrying about exacting vengeance on a foreign civilian population once I'm vaporized...

It's all about the circuit. There are some pretty awful tube audio designs from their heyday... you just don't always see that junk around un modified. Though the junk from the 50s and 60s can sound novel and probably commands value in today's inflated market I'm just not that excited by wolensak tape machine preamps, gates line mixers or like those awful sano guitar amps... those are tube based audio products but not terribly good ones. I'll take a well designed circuit fulla 5532 opamps any day.

But if anyone is giving away an old RCA console or something I'll rent a truck and pick it up tomorrow!

One of the neve designed amek rack units? They're pretty sweet and still under the radar. I guess with so many 9098 and mozart desks having cooked themselves steadily since the 90s there's going to be a lot more recognition of those circuits as racked strips turn up. The rack units amek made at the time have never been a stellar deal despite being relatively unknown. To me, if it says amek it's not worth that much even if neve was involved. Sound quality is good but there's a lot of corner cutting in all amek and TAC gear, mainly in PSU components and actual construction methods. But now is the time to buy any of that amek gear from their heyday, it won't be sleeper gear much longer and as you say, youtube personalities really fuel these gear trends causing a feeding frenzy of kids with disposable income to venture into hardware. You missed this one but the inflated pricing may be temporary.

My experience with that era of amek is that even the TAC scorpion is a very nice sounding collection of circuits. Amek definitely put sound and festures first and if they had worried more about stuff like ventilation maybe they woulda managed to take down SSL... they sold a lot of those media desks to movie studios, but I doubt many are still in service like an SSL J or harrison.