So heres the real question.... we chase down these 40 year old amps and tubes and pay stupid money for the intrinsic value of having a good tone. I just got two 1960s Amperex GZ34 tubes recently so I know first hand. So why is it that we cant make tubes BETTER today than Telefunken and Marconi Osram did back in the day and at a decent price? What did they know that todays tube makers dont? Theres no disputing the differences in quality of tubes when comparing NOS and current production. They sure were relatively cheap when they originally made them then too.
Take yourself back to the early 1960s. Look inside a typical home and what would you see?
A television set, maybe a stereo, a table radio in the kitchen, maybe even a portable record player. Except for the portable record player, most of the electronic entertainment things still considered essential today. These things all required tubes to work. Look at the family car. If it had a radio, it more than likely required tubes as well.
Take a drive around the neighborhood and stop at most any corner store, be it a drug store, one of those 7-11s or supermarkets that were popping up almost everywhere, a mom and pop grocery (pretty much now extinct), and of course a "radio shack". Walk inside. 99 times out of ten, you would find a large piece of equipment with dials and numberous sockets - a tube tester.
Whenever one of those electronic entertainment things stopped working, the drill was to remove all of the tubes, take them to the closest tube tester, test all of them and buy new ones to replace the ones that didn't pass the test. Everybody did it.
If you had a guitar amp and it stopped working you went through the exact same drill. A tube was a tube was a tube - and no hype from tube gurus that you always needed to rebias when replacing tubes - there were no tube gurus.
Fast forward to today. How many people in your neighborhood are buying tubes? Those tube testers vanished during the 1970s never to be seen again. And unless someone is older than 35-40, or play guitar, they probably won't even be able to tell you what a tube is, much less care about buying them or their quality.
The point is that there is no real demand for tubes. For every person that wants or needs any, there are literally hundreds, maybe thousands of people that could care less. That's why the tube makers closed shop.
With the few tube makers we have today, and the limited consumer demand, there is nothing in terms of competition between those tube makers. Manufacturers only care about producing quality products when there is competition. Without competition keeping manufacturers on their toes, quality always slips.
It's not the lack of some secret knowledge lost in history. It's economics.
When Mike Matthews' factory in Russia closes, the production of 2/3 of new tubes available in the world will vanish. Quality will really fall out the bottom and prices will go sky high.
