Amperex

Amperex Bugle Boy 12AU7A ECC82 Long Plates Foil D Getter - Holland 1958 K64 -NIB

$364.50 USD

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Perfectly balanced vintage Amperex 12AU7A tube - Foil D Getter - Bugle Boy Label - Made in Holland, 1958 - NIB NOS - Ultra Rare

Product Summary

The "textbook Heerlen sound" has been referenced in several Soundlumia listings of Amperex Holland 12AU7/ECC82 tubes, and many tube enthusiasts asked what that all means. So this is the answer: the late 1950s and very early 1960s tone, the beginning of over a decade's excellence in sound, the classic tonal template for all the great (and greater) Amperex/Philips/Valvo/Miniwatt tubes to be made in the years to come, the timeless Philips radio tone that many of us grew up listening to.

Sound Qualities

The most distinctive sound feature of the Heerlen 12AU7's is the transparent, natural and expansive midrange presentation, with a slight touch of warmth that illuminates your music. Every piece of music you play through these tubes sounds like from a vinyl record, whether your sound source is phono or not. The sound stage is spacious, deep, structured and holographical. Bass is incredibly deep but well controlled and feels as accurate as on the high end German ECC82's (Siemens, Telefunken, Valvo Hamburg etc.) The stellar performance of foil d-getter takes all these wonderful sound qualities to a whole new level: instrument separation is super clean, detail retrieval is surreal, and it goes without saying that the extremely low noise on these tubes is to the vanishing point.

Professional Sound Evaluation

The tube worked wonderfully and sounded terrific in our professional studio setup for monitoring.

- Input: Cambridge Audio CXC V2 dedicated CD transport + Schiit Audio Bifrost 2 Multibit DAC

- Amplification: Handcrafted Bottlehead Crack Headphone amplifier

- Output: Neumann NDH 20 Closed Back Studio Headphones

Our full tube sound review was written 100% based on the actual listening experience while this tube was running in the system described above.

Professional Tube Testing

NO shorts, leakage or gas. NO noise or microphonics.

This tube tested NOS (100%+ mutual conductance value for NOS/NEW) on a Mercury 2000 tube tester with the following result (mutual conductance both in uMhos and in percentage of NOS/NEW):

3,020/3,000 (101%/100%)

Good tubes start around 2000 and new tubes (incl. NOS/NIB) 3,000, and Mercury 2000's rated mutual conductance (nominal) for new tubes is 3,000. Test result can also be seen in the pictures. In case you wonder what all these numbers would mean to your sound experience, it's actually quite straightforward: mutual conductance directly translates to a tube's ability to amplify sound so the higher the numbers the stronger.

Appearance & cosmetic condition

This tube is in pristine NIB condition. 100% of the paint is intact and well preserved. The Heerlen factory date code etched on glass is perfectly visible:

K64 delta 8E (K64 = 4th-gen ECC82 production, delta = Heerlen, 8 = 1958, E = May)