I talked with Leonard at ARC too. On the extended tube life, he mentioned that the life of the input tubes has gone from 5000 hours to 10,000 hours, but the power tube life at 2000 hours remains the same. The thetubestore.com 6550C power tubes cost 240 a matched set and the input tubes are 95 a set. He said the failure of the 6922's is actually caused by overheating when you place the vt100 in an enclosed area instead of an open rack/amp stand. That amp does generate a lot of heat. He also mentioned that the bass response would be improved and that a new 12v on/off input would be available. This presumably is for future control from another source to turn the amp on and off.
