My friend, Peter (Peter_S here, and on Audiogon), came over tonight for a bit of tube rolling in the MWTP. He’s not been reading anything at all about the Black Treasure tubes (hasn’t been on this thread for a long, long time), and had no real preconceptions about them except that I had told him my initial experience with them and that they were turning out to be very nice tubes that he should hear. He has been playing with the 7N7 variants and agreed to bring over his Loctal adapters and several 7N7 options. We realized in looking at all the options, that we needed to narrow things down a bit so we chose 5 different output tubes to compare.
A few notes on our comparisons: This is by no means a highly scientific trial done with rigorous standards. It was not blind – we did both know just what we were listening to. Selections were not level-matched, except the best we could muster by ear. Each time we inserted a new pair of driver tubes we allowed them to warm-up for approximately 15 minutes, which made this a rather lengthy session. We chose five different cuts of music that we were both familiar with and that represented some diversity (but certainly not the entire spectrum as classical was sadly omitted for time’s sake). So what I’m getting at here is this was a very casually conducted tube rolling session, but I do feel the differences were quite clear, and sometimes quite surprising, as you will see by the results. YMMV, as always.
The music we chose to listen to:
Rickie Lee Jones, Bye Bye Blackbird, from “Pop Pop” (female vocals, soundstaging)
Antony, The Lake, from “The Lake” (EP) (black background, stark vocals and piano)
Radiohead, Pack’t Like Sardines, from “Amnesiac” (very dense, demanding layered, bass-driven with meters almost constantly in overdrive)
Achirana, The Spell (remarkable soundstaging, instrumental finesse, challenging instrumental material)
Greg Brown, Waiting On You, form “Covenant” (deep chesty male vocals)
System: MWTP, MW 36.5 with PS upgrade, MW KWA150, Coincident Super Eclipse III, good wire, some room treatment.
The Black Treasures I have probably have about 80+ hours or so of burn-in at this point. The TSR’s are 1942’s black glass. The KenRad’s are early 50’s I believe and have plenty over 100 hours. The 7N7’s Peter brought are from Andy at Vintage Tube Services (don’t know how much time he’s put on them). He brought others, but these were the two we chose to test as he knew he liked them – One was the more scarce Tall-bottle, this one labeled Philco, the other was the more common short-bottle which Peter says were only bade by Sylvania and relabled with various brands.
Without further ado, and for whatever it may be worth, here is our impressions of the tubes. We basically agreed on many details, and had only one preference differ in our ordering of our personal preferences of the five pairs of output tubes. Oh, I forgot to mention the EML mesh was doing rectification duties the entire time. Below is our ranking of how which we preferred, the first number is my rank, the second, Peter’s.
1/1 Black Treasure CV181Z Best balance of qualities among all 5. Clear and resolving without being aggressive or at all strident. Good soundstage, although topped by Philco Tall Bottle. Best bass of all, deep and well resolved. Great sustain. Symbols and Piano sounded particularly natural.
2/2 Short Bottle 7N7
A lot of sustain. Closer to Black Treasure in many respects than any of the others. A bit sibilant on The Lake. Nice soundstage. I thought they were ever so slightly harder-edged than BT if I had to make a distinction. There were some details brought out with these tubes that we did not notice with other tubes.
3/4 KenRad VT231
Nice sounding, easy to like, didn’t do anything wrong, yet not as engaging when directly compared like this, didn’t have the snap or crispness of short bottle or BT. Very easy to enjoy on its own merits though.
4/3Philco Tall Bottle 7N7
Widest soundstage. Vocals can get aggressive or artificial (mostly on Greg Brown, could be recording). Overall a more forward presentation, with clarity and good separation (both 7n7 tubes shared that quality, though this tall version could tend to sound aggressive at times)
5/5 Tungsol Round Plate TSR
Soundstage muddied on busy music, vocals a bit veiled, more laid back, lost shimmer on high end, lost splash, lost sustain. Midrange (vocal) bump pushed vocals forward and the extremes back. Shockingly, to both of us, we found the TSR’s here to be the least favorite for both of us among the five we tested. This was entirely unexpected. Peter has a good tester and he’s going to test them this weekend.
Overall, we both ended up preferring the very even-handed qualities of the Black Treasures. They just seemed to do everything better and we really could not find fault with them. They were lively and detailed, clear and natural with great soundstaging and great sustain. They took the most challenging passages in stride. They were on the forward side of presentation, yet never sounded aggressive. Not very far behind was the short bottle 7N7 tube (Sylvania rebranded) from Vintage Tube Service. At around $60/pair this represented huge bang for the buck, but the BT’s show them up with really absolutely now weaknesses that would take away from them. The real surprise was how poorly the TSR’s sounded in the lineup and I’m thinking perhaps they’ve just worn out. We’ll find out when Peter tests them.
A big thanks to Peter for bringing over his 7n7’s and Loctal adapter, and for lending a golden ear (two actually) to the comparison. Ian, I’ll bet you’ll have a new customer real soon and a repeat customer in me!
