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Preamp 6922 tube help

So my favorite tubes out of all the ones I've tried are early 1960 Siemens CCA, i find them to have an exteremely clean sound, fuller flat, tight bass, great imaging, just everything you would want. But because my system is on the neutral, the CCA has tipped it to the brighter side because of the "sparkle". I was wondering if anyone had another recommendation for tubes that perform like the Siemens, with its sense of realism but without the brightness in my system. 

Here are the tubes I've tried 


Telefunken E88CC ULM - clean tubes but the bass is too rounded out.
Mullard E188CC - too warm, way too warm
Voskhod Singlewire - great tubes but just didn't feel like didn't have any characteristics
Reflektor Single Wire - seems like the mids were a bit warm, but very nice tubes, but i would always rotate them out after a period because they didn't feel too accurate, but very sweet. 
Amperex - Forgot which ones but the highs and lows were rolled off. 
Electro Harmonix 6922 - has a basic tube sound to them on the warm side of things. 






thewatcher101

Showing 1 response by terry9

terry9
2,244 posts
 
I tried quite a few 6922 variants. By FAR the best was early '60's Telefunken  specially selected for Hewlett Packard  for use in their aerospace test equipment.

The boxes bear the HP logo on their seals.

I think that these were the last tubes that HP trusted anyone to supply with factor seals. After this, they hired summer students to test cartons of tubes, and kept only 2 or 3 out of 100. The rest went in the dumpster. New Amperex 6922's. In the dumpster. So went the stories in the engineering schools in LA at the time. Which would explain why HP branded tubes cost the EARTH.

Good luck finding any. The last NOS sleeve I saw for sale was nearly 20 years ago, and I bought it too dearly.
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