Favorite 300B: Sophia vs KR

one of the things I always wonder about with 300b's is how wide the gulf is between various manufacturers. Prices vary wildly - is something like a Electro Harmonix to Svetlana to new Royal Princess a $700 gap in terms of value and sound. I know only my ears can tell me the answer to that questions so a bit rhetorical.

So maybe sacrilege but have a push pull 300b tube amp (actually on the way its 23 watts of power). It runs four 300b's. Comes with EH 300bs. I also have a 300b set with Full Music se 300bs which are very nice tubes but only 2 of them so you can afford the luxury. So 4 of the high end 300bs is going to set me back at least $1,000, maybe even $1500. Yikes - what do I do - will play with the Eh's for a while but know I am already scheming for some Sophias or something else.....? Is there a budget tube that will give me what I need out of my new amp?

I ordered 4 Shuguang Treasures for my amp. Pricey but grade b tubes came to $700 for the four. This is the down side to 300b amps is that a) the tubes do make a significant difference and b) you pay almost as much as the amp for good tubes. My new amp is a Mactone so a little more than the the price of tubes but seems to be all about the quality of the tubes with 300b amps. Will be interesting to see if the quality tubes make as good a difference with my push pull setup as they did when I upgraded tubes for my 300b set.

Two more things about 300bs:

1. by all accounts these new Treasures take a ton of hours to break in - like don't even listen seriously for 100 hours so Charles1's dad might be a bit before I am back but this is my intent. Hoping the upgraded tubes sees the amp jump forward in significant ways

2. counter intuitive one is that I swapped out my high efficiency Audio Note E's for low efficiency Ellis 1801's and the Ellis' just sing with this amp and the EH tubes. Almost like the Audio Notes are too revealing of the flaws in the 300b tubes...so would I expect the opposite in that I might not notice much difference with the Treasures on the 83db Ellis' but should be a wow with the Audio Notes. Curious.

I have my new Treasures in the Mactone amp. Have only 15 hours on the tubes but these are big improvement right out of the box over the EH tubes that came with the amp. Everything I read is that I need to be patient with these tubes as they burn in ...good thing they sound so good right away and very listenable as break-in happens.

Would love to do a lineup of 300b designs - set, parallel and push pull and compare sound. I have first and third and will be interested in comparing these two with same tubes with my Audio Note speakers.