Valentine's Fairchild Shootout

Thank you very much Eric for taking the time to test our Herchild 660, it sounds great in your skilled hands and ears. Actually both units sound great.





Although we really appreciate you as an incredibly talented engineer and producer, it looks like electronics engineering is not one of your skills and someone else designed this unit for you, which is totally fine. Due to this fact, there are some technical aspects of your speech that not only are not accurate but actually the opposite is true. Let me briefly go through them:



- You state that using the NOS 6BA6 varimu tube is a problem because, as double the number of tubes is needed, heat dissipated is double. In fact, the opposite is true: as you are undoubtedly aware, the main issue with the original Fairchild is the high plate power dissipation in the 6386 tubes, very close or even exceeding the actual rate of the tubes, which means literally that those tubes are frying and a yearly $1500 retubing process is mandatory. With the 6BA6, as there is only one triode per bottle, the maximum plate dissipation is much higher (actually double) and the life expectancy is way higher, not to mention that retubing the unit will cost a tenth.





- You go on saying that because 6386s have 2 triodes in the same bottle, matching is easier. Again, the opposite is exactly true, as JJ 6386 triodes in the same bottle are often poorly matched and there is no way to remedy this, as JJ wont take any responsibility. This is a big issue during production as I’m sure you have experienced but is a much bigger one if a customer needs to service a unit, as replacing one single defective tube won’t be enough. Poorly matched 6386s can’t simply be used and this and the sound quality factor made us discard their use at a very early stage. You will never have this problem with 6BA6s. We use our own test jigs to match tubes down to +-0.2dB in the 0-20dB range of compression.





- You try to insinuate that customers buying our units are at a risk because we will eventually run out of NOS tubes and the investment will be lost. ( I guess the same applies for U47, M49, U67, etc buyers in your opinion…and buyers of Unfairchild 670 MK1s btw). Again, the opposite is true: We secured tubes for a lifetime, customers can obtain a tube set at cost within the first 2 years of purchase and military tubes are fantastic. With 6386s you are at the mercy of the JJ company and if they decide to stop making the tube, your unit will be the anchor boat. I sincerely hope this will never be the case. Our customers can get a full set of 22 extra tubes when purchasing the unit at cost. Of course, eventually NOS tube supply will disappear, JJ factory will close and the earth will collapse against the sun, but thats another matter.





- It is interesting that you defend the JJ 6386s tube as the “holy grail” and THE way to go whilst the original Unfairchild MK1 did not use them in favor of NOS tubes. We concur with your former opinion on this though: NOS tubes are far superior than JJ 6386s.





- You go further and spread a list of features that the Herchild is “missing”. Firstly, none of those features are present in the Fairchild 670 and, to be honest, are not that interesting in our humble opinion. We appreciate your creativity when designing your unit, but our criteria was to simply recreate the legendary sound of the original. You can get a slow attack and fast release with almost any compressor nowadays without having to spend nowhere near 10 grand. It was a great technical achievement at the time to be able to get the fast attack the 670 has, and that is the sound it is reknowned for. On another side, our unit has all the gain calibration points you state it doesn’t have, only that they are on the inside of the unit. We wonder why a final user being able to misalign the unit is a desired feature.





- Lastly, we simply welcome competition. It is in the sole interest of customers to be able to access so many great products from different manufacturers. You made your recreation, we did ours. We congratulate you for this and wish you the best in the pro audio manufacturing business.



Peter R.