General electric - Vacuum Tube Factory for sale!

[Bloch]

General electric - Vacuum Tube Factory for sale!





http://www.kenrockwell.com/Images/audio/2012/tube-factory.pdf

[BravoV]

I wonder if someone take a visit and rent it for short moment at the factory floor, clean up those decades of dust  , hire a pro photographer and 2 models. One model is an old man pretending working on those tube glass machine, while other model that looks like a younger scientist busy with some modern testing equipments like a high end dso, a spectrum analyzer and a modern computer desktop screen with some crap from sci-fi movie in it, and all of these are placed side by side with those tube making machine.

The purpose is to make a background scene that looks so convincing that the tube is being made now using the good ole classic way but somehow mixed, verified and tested using ultra modern gears.

Then grab those cheapo china made tubes but labeled them with an ultra premium price, packed it in a nice looking case and put that scene above as a background in the flyer or brochure to fool those audiofools.

Wonder will this work ? 

[Bored@Work]

put that scene above as a background in the flyer or brochure to fool those audiofools.

But audiofools don't believe in measurements. What you need is a smug, prototypical looking audiofool model, labelled as quality inspector, pretending to listen to the *cough* *vomit * warmth sound of each and every tube. Discarding those not up to his taste, and personally signing those deemed worthy. Maybe give the model a small chrome plated hammer he uses to ping the tubes and destroy those he doesn't like.

[PStevenson]

I feel like I've been here before and I feel like I've said this before but what the hell..

I wonder if they can do something useful in the factory like make transistors haha

[G7PSK]

I quite like valves/tubes I grew up with them and in the right place they are great, The Americans once captured a Russian MIG during the height of the cold war and scoffed like mad when they found valves on the front end of the electronics. Then it dawned on some one that if it came to a nuclear war and an electromagnetic pulse the Russian planes would still be flying and the US ones would not as the valves hardened the electronics against the electromagnetic pulse.

[GeoffS]

I might just bid on this.
I figure I can really make a killing once this fad for these new fangled transistors wears off!

Retirement, here I come!

[Jon Chandler]

The plant does look much different than the setup used by Claude Pallard to handcraft tubes in .  Clearly a very hands-on, labor-intensive operation.

[AntiProtonBoy]

If I were wealthy, I'd buy it for the fun of it, and also to preserve a bit of history.

[Excavatoree]

Groove tubes decided that they could import tubes from China and do all the "inspection" hokey-pokey  without models, factories, and faked photos.

I guess if one could reach higher in the stratosphere of audiofoolery, it might work....

[krivx]

Wow, people here seem to love jumping down the throats of anyone using tubes. I'm pretty sure Groove Tubes were manufacturing for instrument amplifiers and are aiming to sell to guitar players and not hifi people.

[G7PSK]

Here is an interesting application for valves/tubes, it's an electronic ignition system for I.C engines, I would like to know if the engine gave a rounder,warmer sound with this rather than the solid state systems that we have now.

[Gall]

Not being a tube enthusiast, I recently decided to build a tube amp just because it looks cool. (Yes, I like steampunk and wooden boxes). And I think I understood the source of all the audiofool's mythes!

A poorly designed semiconductor amp almost always has bad sound. Someone who doesn't understand circuits well is most likely unable to bild a good one.

A poorly designed tube amp works quite well! Even a quick-and-dirty breadboard prototype with a wrong resistor (I misinterpreted orange as red wile reading color bars on an old and dirty Soviet resistor, 330k instead of 220k) was compatible with my first good semiconductor amps. Tubes are just much more robust, while semiconductors cannot excuse mistakes. A final tube version sounds just a bit worse than my latest IC amp but better than my first ones.

Thus if you want to design an amplifier but haven't read at least Horowitz and Hill's book - go for tubes! They will work good enough even in a poor design. A good semiconductor design would be much better, but can you do a good one?

[kiyotewolf]

This is a golden opportunity for Dave, so he can build replica Delorian tube-based flux capacitor circuits, each and every day for the rest of his life.

"the valves hardened the electronics against the electromagnetic pulse"

That make me smile smugly.  People so dependent on doped silicon, forgetting the real hearty steak and potatoes stuff which is tubes/valves.



~Paul

If I could, I would dive headfirst into a course, in tube electronics.

I really really wish I could get that knowledge in my head.  I would build all sorts of mixers, and little flip flops and 4-bit computer toys, (maybe with core memory), for fun, and profit.

[vk6zgo]

Here is an interesting application for valves/tubes, it's an electronic ignition system for I.C engines, I would like to know if the engine gave a rounder,warmer sound with this rather than the solid state systems that we have now.

Way back in the day,Bendix in the USA were experimenting with Electronic fuel injection.
If I remember correctly,the  original units used valves.
Later,when Electronic fuel injection became common,all the "motoring journalists" gave all the credit to Bosch,with no mention of this pioneering work.

VK6ZGO

"Valves!----- FETs with a fire in 'em!"

[ronwoch]

I'm the first to admit that I am expert in nothing.
That said, there IS, often times a distinctive difference between old tube audio gear and solid state. Some people, like myself, prefer that sound. If you don't, cool, I don't care. I'm not saying it is a BETTER sound. Just that I personally like it more.
And I think it looks cool.

/end useless opinion.

[amspire]

There were things that were possible in the valve days that are not really possible now.

My father's first HiFi amplifier was actually custom built by our local radio repair guy.

The thing is that pre-made chassis were available pre-punched for valves, terminal strips, capacitors and a transformer. and the circuits had a relatively few resistors and capacitors.  All these extra parts just get attached to terminal strips. So it was not that hard to build a complete power amplifier from scratch in less then a day.

With the cost of electronics back then, it was probably cheaper getting a custom made amplifier to a similar brand name one.

You would think it would be much easier today, but it is not.

Also if you look back to the invention of Television, the two people who deserve most of the credit were Philo Farnsworth and Vladimir Zworykin of RCA.

Philo invented the concept of a working TV camera in the 1910's when he was about 14 years old, when he was in his early twenties, he set up a company to make a TV system and by 1927, he had the first properly working electronic TV camera and screen. They would have made the camera tube themselves, and they could have made the other tubes as well. That is what you can do with your own Vacuum Tube factory, and ten times the brains of any of us. 

Richard

[AntiProtonBoy]

Also if you look back to the invention of Television, the two people who deserve most of the credit were Philo Farnsworth and Vladimir Zworykin of RCA.

Philo invented the concept of a working TV camera in the 1910's when he was about 14 years old, when he was in his early twenties, he set up a company to make a TV system and by 1927, he had the first properly working electronic TV camera and screen. They would have made the camera tube themselves, and they could have made the other tubes as well. That is what you can do with your own Vacuum Tube factory, and ten times the brains of any of us. 

Richard

John Logie Baird needs a big honourable mention, too. He was the fist to successfully demonstrate TV transmission in 1925. He also invented colour TV, the stereoscopic TV,  and also proposed a HDTV quality transmission standard as well.

[IanB]

You would think it would be much easier today, but it is not.

Back in the 70's I found a book on electronics in my local public library. It was interesting because it had various valve circuits and explained how they worked, but it also described how the FET was quite similar in operation to a valve and presented many equivalent FET circuits next to the valve circuits to show how similar they were.

It's amusing because if I remember correctly the story of the transistor, it is the FET transistor that people were trying to make. However, it turned out to be much easier to make BJT transistors instead and so those are what came to market first. If they had succeeded in making the FET they had wanted to make then all those "solid state" transistor radios of the 70's that were packed tight with components would doubtless have been made with FETs and would have had a much lower component count...

(And I regret that I didn't hang on to one of those pocket transistor radios for the nostalgia value. Not least because of the metal can germanium transistors  )

[amspire]

John Logie Baird needs a big honourable mention, too. He was the fist to successfully demonstrate TV transmission in 1925. He also invented colour TV, the stereoscopic TV,  and also proposed a HDTV quality transmission standard as well.

As an inventor, he is fairly irrelevent in developing the technology of TV, as he had a real talent for being attracted to the impractical solutions, while at the same time, others were working on the real solutions. He did rush out a TV system using bad technology, but you have to remember at the same time, work was a very long way down the track at producing proper electronic TV.

However as an entrepreneur, he is incredibly important.  By talking the public broadcaster, the BBC to broadcast his experimental TV and then making very good money by selling TV kits, he forced the British government to choose the first ever TV standard which turned out to be between the RCA/EMI Image orthicon tube based system and the Farnsworth camera tube based James Logie Baird solution.  Much to Farnsworth's horror when he had to go to England to get Bairds TV system to work (Baird couldn't make it work himself), Baird was still using rotating disk for the TV even when cathode ray TVs were the obvious available solution.

RCA had to pay Farnsworth royalties for their camera, so Farnwsworth was involved in both alternatives.

The fame of James Logie Baird as "The Inventor of Television" was always largely a political stunt. Britain was feeling very miffed by the fact that all the big inventions were no longer happening in Britain.

Richard

[Gall]

You would think it would be much easier today, but it is not.

Absolutely agree. I made a lot of different circuits. Building a semiconductor one requires lots of preparations and calculations. Valve amplifier can just be built at evening for fun without any drawings. And I bet it will be better than most commercially available low-cost "modern" amps.

One may design a really good FET amp but this is for sure not a holiday evening work.

[G7PSK]

Here is an interesting application for valves/tubes, it's an electronic ignition system for I.C engines, I would like to know if the engine gave a rounder,warmer sound with this rather than the solid state systems that we have now.

Way back in the day,Bendix in the USA were experimenting with Electronic fuel injection.
If I remember correctly,the  original units used valves.
Later,when Electronic fuel injection became common,all the "motoring journalists" gave all the credit to Bosch,with no mention of this pioneering work.

VK6ZGO

Unfortunately that is all to common in history. Take Bunsen he is credited with inventing the Bunsen burner He did not he just popularized its use but he did invent along with many  other things the  carbon zinc cell that is still used today with the credit going to Volta who did do work with cells but it was Bunsen's which became a commercial success.

"Valves!----- FETs with a fire in 'em!"