Ben Verrellen Octal power tube replacements

Alan W

Alan W

Well-known member
Just became aware of this today, and while I’m not a likely customer, these guys have the bona fides for this to be the real deal. When you start to think of the possibilities—consistently matching say, a black plate GE, or whatever, and having choices where you’d know what you were getting, every time, zero biasing issues, etc. Pretty cool.

www.verellendevices.com

VERELLEN DEVICES

www.verellendevices.com www.verellendevices.com
 
Sounds really cool, although listing "price" as a downside for tubes when you're selling the replacement at $299 a pair is interesting (yes, it would pay itself back over time, but it will take a loooong time).

Increased headroom is not necessarily a huge plus either I think, since a lot of the reason we use tubes is that they distort very nicely.

But if you want to use a tube amp and want more reliability and price is not an issue, this sounds pretty nice. A drop test from 8 feet is impressive in that sense.
 
I appreciate the tech and design but from my view point they are a big meh. Why not just go with a tube preamp and a proper solid state power amp.

I find the opposite, ss preamp into tube power amp, is more interesting. I’ve been doing some experiments running epic solid state preamps (think like Beta, VH etc) into a tube power amp. It’s like chocolate and peanut butter.

Long live the big quad.
 
I had a Musicman amp years ago and it sounded pretty good. I believe it was SS preamp into a pair of 5881s or 6L6s. If you used a pair of Octals in it then it's all SS.

I'd be interested in trying some. Getting good reliable tubes is getting harder and more expensive all the time. I won't buy anything from Russia for the foreseeable future, haven't used a Chinese tube I liked, so that just leaves JJ (NOS for power tubes is too $$ for me). I like JJ and usually bias at around 50-60% so they last a decent amount of time. Not using the filament winding is interesting and opens up more opportunities in amp design. It would be more interesting of they had some which sounded like a 6L6, some like an EL34, etc. Maybe the standard Octal sounds good anyway?
 
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Hey at 300€ a pair and judging by the way things are going, they soon will be cheaper than a pair of KT88.
 
Ya I automatically dislike them now too. If Ben Verellen wants to give me an amp for free, that might sway my opinion back in his direction. But until then, he sucks.
 
HamishR said:
It would be more interesting of they had some which sounded like a 6L6, some like an EL34, etc. Maybe the standard Octal sounds good anyway?
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that’s what I was beginning to imagine—not only type types, like you suggest, but even finer specs, like specific NOS flavors. It seems like tuning these would be a matter of slight component substitutions; or the possibility to have a knob or a multi position switch to allow you to internally set bias high or low, etc. I think the output transformers in tube amps are a large component of their sound, which most SS amps bypass.
 
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