exorbitant road tax!

biasing is a piece of cake!

expensive magical bottles

it happens again - that i have lost my "peak" sound! i have been basking in the glory of the improved sound brought forth by my LS26. the honeymoon period came to an abrupt end.

a week ago, i detected that my sound has deteriorated - the mids thinned, the bloom and harmonic textures vanished - and generally not great sounding anymore. wearing my sherlock holmes hat, i went investigating using my well-documented checklist (entitled "when things go wrong"). from TNB supply, earth-grounding, to my interconnects and cables, i couldn't find anything amiss. so, the only suspect is my tubes.... but hey, wait a second, didn't i replace the svet winged-c 6550s only march last year? so i wasn't convinced it is tube problem. i listened for another week.

a week passed, the sound is still lacking. i couldn't stand it anymore. so i reluctantly took out my spare set of svets which i bought in july last year, ready to replace with the old tubes. as i was pulling out the tubes one by one, i noticed most of them have already gone "botak", that the mercury top has thinned to such extent that there is no longer a thick coverage of silvery layer on top! my goodness, i cried.

the new tubes took about an hour to sound stable after the biasing but do they sound glorious! i definitely can tell what is a "normal" sound and what is a "weakened" sound!

i am scratching my head now. do the new production svets winged-c really have such a short OPTIMAL shelf life? (the keyword here is "OPTIMAL" which i estimated to be 1,000 hours) or is my hearing that good to detect even the slightest of deterioration? i know of people playing power tubes for years.

whatever, it scares the hell of me. this is the shortest lifespan of power tubes i have ever experienced in my entire life. the 16 pieces of 6550s cost me RM2,000. divided by 12 months, it costs me RM167 a month for pure aural bliss! this is frighteningly expensive "road tax"!

everything comes with a price, i console myself. being a perfectionist audiophile is definitely not easy.