Agreed. You have to remember that vacuum tube development and improvement when on steadily from the early 1900's through the early 1960's with compaction tubes being one of the final new developments in tube design. (compactron tubes have been overlooked as lesser value tubes, junk tubes, but were actually electrically and mechanically rugged and some can be quality audio amplifiers) Since tubes basically "were electronics" until the end of the 50's a great deal of time and money was spent fine tuning their design and manufacturing. That kind of infrastructure is long gone.One Man’s Quest to Revive the Great American Vacuum Tube
The prized retro audio components are mostly manufactured in Russia and China. Now, a small Georgia company is rebooting US production.www.wired.com
It would be pretty cool to have US-made tubes again, but I have my doubts that they would ever hold up to the old ones.
And one of the last amps to use the compactrons was the Ampeg Jet-12D. Unfortunately, because the specific compaction tube (6BK11) was one of the last, they are EXTREMELY hard to find and priceless to those of us who happen to own one of these amps (tremendous clean tones!).
I see your Jet-12D, and raise you a Fender Super Champ, made 1983-1986.
Mesa and Groove Tubes were only sorters/rebranders of tubes.
I have one, and I've stocked up on GE and RCA NOS 6C10s.
There was an interruption in supply, that caused a big spike in the price of tubes immediately after the invasion of Ukraine. Prices have come back down, but I'm not certain if that's because Russian tubes are available again, or whether Slovakia/China picked up the slack.
Yes and have been for a long time. But I agree with your assessment that the old tube from US, England, Netherlands, Germany are superior and last a long time. I've never had a Mullard GZ34 die (yet).
"Harder" and "Softer" vacuum was a marketing term invented by Aspen Pittman, Huckster, RIP. I believe he was trying to invent a term to reflect how much C voltage was required to bias the tube at idle, aka how much drive the tube would require to attain maximum amplifier output. 6L6 and 6550 types require greater voltage, EL34 and EL84 require substantially less. This has to do with the geometry of the tube innards, and not with vacuum depth inside the tube.