Telefunken is king!!!lol
Telefunks in my se84 (pendantish)work great!!
I find them the best with 3d holographics. They are not overly warm but still smooth out all the digital glare/edge out and the depth/width and sparkle is there galore. The only super bummer con to them is the price but if you know what you are doing you can find good deals on ebay if and only if you have a way to test them as ebay can be super shoddy with integrity! Plus *if there are super closely matched un-microphonic pairs they still can get expensive but if you buy enough pairs that are not matched and then mix match others you already have, the price can get better.
Best to invest in a tube tester for a few hundred or find someone local that will test for a dollar a tube.
Or you can shell out extra for a no headache easy deal from brent jesse(I assume you grabbed that picture from his site so you are familiar with him. Most tubes from him are awesome but I had a few ones that were pretty microphonic and was a tad bummed out).
Hey guys many of you have been asking for a direct shoot out Pendant vs. Elise would Friday afternoon work for you guys if I did a live stream or is next week better with the holiday?
So I’ve had my Pendant for about 2 months now, and my Verite Closed for about a month or so. I have:
A random Mullard 12AX7
A Mazda Silver Plate 12AX7
A Ratheon windmill getter 5751
A Ratheon black plate 12AX7
An RFT 12AX7 and 12AU7
On top of the listed input tubes, I have a few different power tube combos. Where I’m going with this is - I’m embarrassed to admit that I’m struggling to hear any real differences between all of the tubes, and I’m pulling my hair out trying to figure out why that is. The graph you’re sharing implies I should be hearing something radically different through tube rolling, but that hasn’t been my experience yet and I’m worried it’s my ears…
Dont worry about it. They sometimes can be very subtle and its like splitting hairs. Im pretty sure with transformer based amps it can be harder to tell differences in a big way unless you really train your hearing and especially volume match. Plus once you change the tubes and hear them up tgere has been so much time in between its hard to compare.
Different ubes have similar sonic character and can be made in the same plant. A good comparison is mullard/amperex vs telefunken/Siemens. All NOS tube are also not created equal.
If you really want to pursue hearing a difference keep the same tubes in for about a month then change them.allow your hearing to really set into the sound. Before switching. Focus your ear on just hearing details for example the sound of the snare drum, smoothness of the voice, imaging, deciphering the bass drum vs the bassguitar, is there air around the instruments, is it warm or bright, the depth of the drums and how wide the staging is, how does the bass overall sound(louder than other stuff—lower-tight or loose) Do you pick up little subtle sounds you normally dont hear, listen to really really well mastered and recorded stuff too. Make sure your headphones can produce the differences and details too.
Hope this helps and at the end of the day throw tubes in that you like the sound and forget about it. Set it and get it and don’t give yourself a headache.
Make sure you are adding a warm el84 with a warm 12___, if you have a neutral el84 with a warm 12___ and compare it to a neutral el84 and a warm 12___ you are just swapping similarities.
With my pendantish amp i use telefunken el84s and 12____ and then swap to a full amperex/mullard set when changing.
Verite closed will sound like a Verite closed. Same with any headphone. Upstream changes will generally have subtle if any effect on the overall sound unless you know what to listen for or there’s something really wrong. Just my experience.
I feel depending on the dac or streamer its more than subtle. I can inject a warm tube dac like my Orchid or add a ESS dac and change the sound my headphones receive.
Driver tubes are generally considered the tube changes that will make the most difference. However, how the tubes interact with each other may be of just as much importance.
For instance, with my amp (not Pendant, but on that level) when I initially changed out the driver tubes I heard mild changes at best, changes for sure but they did require listening for them. Later on I decided to change out the recitfier to something considered “better”, just as a what the heck gamble, and that had an immediate and very noticeable impact on amp performance, for the better.
Better amp performance created by the rectifier had the effect of magnifying any driver tube changes I made. Now, I can pretty easily here differences in staging, clarity, speed and tonality.
Not saying to go out and change your rectifier as perhaps my experience was a fluke (lots of folks claim rectifiers make little difference) but just pointing out that in an all tube amp you have multiple things to consider, which can be a blessing or a curse.
What @Earmuffs is saying is very much worth considering as well: changing like for like may make hearing differences difficult and you could also very well be using the same OEM for tubes across different brand names. You might be using all Mullards for instance even if you have 3-4 different “brands” of tubes. Just an example, I have no real idea of the provenance of your driver tubes and that information can be hard to come by.
If you are happy with how the amps sounds then dont go nuts over it. I do some tube rolling for amusement and interest. I realize its a deep rabbbit hole whose end you can chase forever. There are any number of tube combinations I would be happy with for long term listening. I could go back to stock and still have a sound better than anything I had before. I try to keep that perspective.
I’ve said this before I love tube amps, hate rolling tubes.
Most of the time the changes are “subtle” increases in stage, better extension in treble/bass, better bass control. You’re also usually trading things off when cycling through them.
NOS tubes generally seem to sound better than new production, though some of the higher end new tubes really are pretty good.
I spent a fair amount of time rolling on the pendant I had two amps that took EL84’s an several that would take 12A?7’s so it was interesting.
The rectifier I did replace, but I honestly just asked Zach what he liked and bought one, difference wasn’t night and day to me.
I liked the Tungsram EL84’s, I liked the EI EL84’s, I liked the PSVane EL84’s (burn in on those is a good 150 hours), and ended up with a Mullard 12AU7, though I thought the RCA’s were good.
The pendant was actually very good with stock tubes (theTuba by comparison really needed a replacement set of EL84’s), rolling is a deep rabbit hole.
My general rule is find something decent and stop, or at least set a budget, I’ve seen so people spend more on tubes than the amp they go in, if your going to do that, buy a better amp.
Discovery of the day: 1770 Pro does “tube” well with Pendant. I’ve pad-swapped mine to the stock Beyer pleather pads (IMO better consistency / coherency, better isolation, and tuck-funs of bass, lol).
I’ve had the Beyers put away for a while, but someone was asking me questions about 177x Go vs 1770 Pro and I had to pull them out to check. Finally pad-swapped my 177x as well, and I think I can like them now.
A few more notes, I suppose:
I am still using the Baldwin green-text NOS set in my Pendant–same ones I’ve had installed since I got it. I’m also using the High Z output. I’m getting hard-hitting bass with excellent clarity and space in mids and nice crisp highs. Flavor is consistent to what I’m getting out of SS amps (e.g., V280), but with that same “more room to breathe” that has me addicted to this amp / tube set.
I’m not too surprised that this combo works, but I can’t recall having heard or read much about 1770s on tubes, so I figured I’d stop in and give it a thumbs up.
Ok gang! It seems like this Friday at 7pm PST December 4th, we will have a live stream on my channel about my sound impressions of the Pendant vs. Elise
I have noticed especially in the small business world prices tend to go up rather than go down in the long run. Maybe costs of components went up? Or maybe since its conception, there hasn’t been a big enough amount made for the effort. I’m just glad they are raising the price instead like some other companies cheaping out on the quality of components to keep the retail the same.
On another note, I have noticed that most models sold for a long period of time will raise in price due to countering inflation. This is all me speculating and someone else might have much smarter knowledge of how this stuff works
Definitely a great time to jump in on one right now for sure.
