Buy tubes from Audio Research or not

Not to pile on, but when I tried to retube a VT100 mk2 through Upscale they were rude to me also, but more importantly they were rude to my amp! LOL. Anyway, when I retubed a VT200 a couple of years later I remembered Kevin's, um, "direct"ness and ordered tubes from a Canadian seller. The tubes were supposedly Svetlana SED 6550C's like ARC uses, but the pins were slightly thinner... Anyway, one of the tubes flared, damaging the amp. So while the tube seller was happy to replace the tube, I had to send the amp to ARC for repairs which cost me about $700, mostly for shipping. So, I now have a Ref 3 and Ref 110, and I will absolutely buy my tubes from ARC.

It should be mentioned in this thread somewhere that the Mk3 VT100 is a piece of cake to retube. You only need to bias the output tubes, not the inputs/drivers as on the mk2. I wonder if the problems in tube arcing in the Mk2 are from the difficulty in biasing the inputs. It is not an issue in mk3's.