In my first "nice" system which consists of a Pass Labs X0.2 3-box arrangement front end, and a pair of Aleph 1.2 mono's (200 wpc Class A), plus a Nakamichi Dragon CD Changer, which are all about 20 years old now; all of my equipment runs like a top and without any problems. I'm thinking that in 5 years or so, I'll need to send it all back to Pass Labs to have the capacitors all replaced. Caps like any electrical part has some sort of limited service life.
As far as you tubed gear running for 20 years without a hitch, that's impressive. As for buying tube gear, I don't know the wisdom of this, but I *just* bought a pair of completely rebuilt Sonic Frontiers' Power 3 monos from SF Owner/VP Chris Johnson; the core is some 20 years old now, but they're built to "21st Century" Special Edition *Plus* and the power supply along with rectifiers are modernized in conjunction with the grid heater ckt; Mundorf gold & silver audio grade caps are used throughout plus it's modded to run up to KT150s, but I chose a bit of more conservative tube path in using KT120 tubes to replace the original 6550C (or KT88 maybe?) bottles; KT120s are about half the cost of the KT150 bottle and with 16 of them in total, getting stuck with a $2,000 dollar or so tube cost doesn't exactly sound mouth watering to me... I've been waiting 20 years to buy these, and now that I have 2 nickels to rub together at this point in my life, I'll have them soon! I can't wait.
As far as you tubed gear running for 20 years without a hitch, that's impressive. As for buying tube gear, I don't know the wisdom of this, but I *just* bought a pair of completely rebuilt Sonic Frontiers' Power 3 monos from SF Owner/VP Chris Johnson; the core is some 20 years old now, but they're built to "21st Century" Special Edition *Plus* and the power supply along with rectifiers are modernized in conjunction with the grid heater ckt; Mundorf gold & silver audio grade caps are used throughout plus it's modded to run up to KT150s, but I chose a bit of more conservative tube path in using KT120 tubes to replace the original 6550C (or KT88 maybe?) bottles; KT120s are about half the cost of the KT150 bottle and with 16 of them in total, getting stuck with a $2,000 dollar or so tube cost doesn't exactly sound mouth watering to me... I've been waiting 20 years to buy these, and now that I have 2 nickels to rub together at this point in my life, I'll have them soon! I can't wait.