To all you Cary SLI 80 owners, I'm looking for tube suggestions

@immatthewj My Cary V12 came with Rubys. At the time, I thought it was a great sound. I was under the impression that these were EL34s that were rebranded by Ruby? For some reason, and I may be wrong, at the time (’01) I was under the impression that the Ruby EL34s were Chinese?

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Shuguang EL34BSTR labeled as Ruby. I had them in my Cary V12R and liked them quite a bit. They sounded exceptionally good after I recapped the amp with Mundorf EVO Silver-Gold coupling caps. I liked them quite a bit actually. For sale here at Doug’s Tubes to get some ideas for comparison.

@immatthewj  I forgot to mention bias in the V12 / V12R. The original manual calls for higher settings, and my local tech disagreed with this. We jumped on a call with the design tech after Dennis left cary, and he said they had now recommended lower bias settings per bank, not as high as 275ma any more.  However, I see the manuals I found online were never updated. I found out after a few other V12/V12Rs had been in for repair so I paid close attention to this on mine. 

Looked it up just now, with EL34s, still read this, checking tonight still reads "Follow the instructions provided. (250-275 mA is the recommended bias setting range, per side, with 220 mA being the minimum suggested bias level setting) Make certain to set the test meter used to mA range.". Well, Looks like the old manual was never updated to reflect lower values. I ran and tested 275, 240, 200ma per side over a few years. My tech was insistent 200ma per side was plenty (which is 33.3ma per Shuguang EL34 tube) Sure they can handle more but he felt it would help save the tubes and transformers to live longer.  After this I never went over 220ma per bank. The last few years I had that amp I kept it at 200ma per bank and it sounded great fwiw.