@ sns.
About 1 month after purchasing the Coincident Statement, Israel, mailed the sand cast resistors to me with an explanation of there use and affect to the filament circuit. Unlike you, I had what he sent installed. In hindsight I regret not upgrading those sand cast resistors. I appreciate you bringing it up. With this recent failure, it didn’t cross my mind. Also I had no knowledge of the high failure rate of the Linlai mesh and solid plate. I returned the Linlai mesh plate to grant Fidelity due to noise issues. The grant Fidelity website shows both the mesh and solid plate out of stock, allowing you to be advise / notified by Grant when they are restocked; Nothing is mentioned about there discontinuation. I was thinking that maybe the solid plate may be less noisy than the mesh and was going to do a little research to see if anyone had experience with the tube. I probably won’t go down that path, now that provided me with info on the cause of the high failure rate of these tubes. My Coincident Statement was equipped with the white base Psvane when I purchased it (Demo from Coincident, still covered in plastic sheeting) One of the tubes failed in less than 10 hours. At the time I was unable to find any Psvane WE tubes so I purchased a matched pair of Psvane white base tubes from Viva. One of the two failed with 20 hours. It was a couple of months before I was able to purchase and install the WE. I have been logging elapsed time in use on the WE, but still need to add it all up to see how much actual time on the tubes. My guess is less than 500 hours. Both TJ Full Music and Sophia are mesh plate tubes. Sophia has there tubes made by various manufactures, according to Copilot AI, but most manufactured by Shuguang; Sophia test and screens there tubes. I am guessing that the process is accomplished in China. Regardless of tube quality it appears to be a no win situation, considering there heater filaments are subjected to vibration and impact damage during shipment. Unless like you stated, you happen to get a rare reliable pair that stood up to the rigors of shipment. TJ Full Music are also made and shipped from China.
The new Coincident statement has been redesigned and the 300B replaces the 101D. I will have to check with Israel to see if existing Mk III Statement’s can be modified to use the 300B.
One thing I should of asked of you earlier is; are you saying that the Linlia Elite , and Psvane tubes are more suspectable to shipping issues due to there design/material use than the entry level Psvane or Shuguang tubes?
Did you find the Linlai tube to be noisy. Since the Full Music and Sophia are both mesh plates, I would like to find out if others using these tubes had any noise issues or is this problem more of a Linlai issue than a mesh plate issue.
sns, thanks for your contribution / help regarding this issue. Brad