Valentine's Fairchild Shootout

Good point! Done and done LOL

With this (most recent) talk about a run on certain tubes, Heritage must be rushing to release their own spiff’d up bottles!

Agreed with previous comments on spiffs not being a revelation. Speaking as someone who has just whittled down preferences with trial and error.

That said, planting negative rumors about current models moments before releasing clones, is a topic that caught my eye.

Double-checked and they did announce their CL1B clone a few weeks after a “rumor” about Tube-Tech running out of opto cell parts was posted/discussed. Lightning strikes twice? Could be. Tempted to waste a day sleuthing out any truth to it, unless I’m barking up the wrong tree.

As of today, I’d buy the Undertone (it sounds great and Valentine’s video is very fair). Herchild sounds good and offers a single channel, but I would not support shady business practices, from them or their distributors.

There are two types of people who have $10k to spend now and want to spend on a clone now versus $11k with research?

I believe it. And the difference, in that scenerio, might be one maker sneaking around and the other keeping it more real. Agreed the choice is worth noting.

Or perhaps more apropos to this thread, it’s like loading an instance of Ozone and calling yourself a mastering engineer

If someone wants to recreate a 660/670 without the murkiness in the low end/low mids, it will be more appealing to me.

Hey All!

This is my first post on this forum! I see some familiar usernames here from Gearspace. I look forward to chatting with ya again

I wanted to add this video to this thread because it is a continuation of the other two that are being discussed.

A viewer named Jason Sanderson made this comment:

“i'd love to see you do a video experiment where you order 8 tubes from them without them knowing who you are and just stick them an Unfairchild and see what happens. Haha “

I took on the challenge and documented it all to share it with everyone. The video was originally posted on my MRwEV (Making Records with Eric Valentine) YouTube channel but I had to take it down because I forgot to blur my home address on it AHHHHH!!! I’ve fixed that, and now I can repost it. I am creating a YouTube channel for UTA so this and other UTA centric videos can live in that world instead of the MRwEV world.

The video is a bit slow to watch because there are sections I left unedited to be sure there would be no question that the tubes ordered from antique electronics are the ones used in the unit that is listened to.

I messed up one part of the challenge. My antique electronics account is under my given name (Eric Dodd) which made it possible to have the tube seller not know that it is “Eric Valentine” ordering the tubes but when filling out the shipping address, my Chrome browser auto-filled it as “Valentine”. I didn’t catch it at the time. While I don’t think this affects the results of the experiment (I seriously doubt antique electronics would know or care about who I am or what I might be doing with the tubes) I was bummed that i can’t say they I stuck exactly to the letter of the challenge. Viewing it now, you wouldn’t know because the names/addresses are blurred, but I wanted to let everyone know in case it might matter to someone.

I think there is some interesting info in the video on how to best match JJ 6386 tubes based on the JJ tube test data they provide. I show what the tubes sound like if I match them up for the best possible results and if they are mismatched for the worst possible results. It was a really fun experiment to do! Hopefully, there is some helpful info in there

Thanks drbill!  Looks like a lovely community of fellow audio nerds ya'll have rounded up here on RGO

Love my MPDI-4 preamp.   Seems to be so underrated.

Like scissors?

Am a big EV fan too.
Love my 635a and 767a.

Well really I used to be.
Now am an air conditioner.
(Cues "My Funny Valentine"/Sinatra)

Great you're here!
Chris

Hey!  happy to hear the MPDI-4 is working for ya!  Ya know... its hard to break through the (well deserved) tidal wave of love there is for Neve's and APIs out there.  The people who have discovered the MPDI-4 seem to really love them.  I know I do

Happy MPDI-4 user here too. There's a big hole in my rack where an Unfairchild should be but unfortunately there's a big hole in my wallet too. Welcome!