Current Production Tube Compliment?

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BBQLS1
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Re: Current Production Tube Compliment?

Post by BBQLS1 »

rfgordon wrote:When things are deeply frozen, as in the cryogenic treatment, the crystalline structure can be altered a bit, which may or may not be desirable, depending on the thing being frozen and the way in which it is brought back to earth temperature.

In order for a deep freeze to work any real "magic" on items made of metal, the temperature must be at least as cold as liquid Nitrogen. However, because a vacuum tube's metal components are different metals, and some have special surface treatments, all it really amounts to is thermal stress in the extreme. It wreaks havoc on the pin-to-glass seals, since the glass and the pins have differing specific heat and thermal inertia, and, thus, their rates of expansion differ.

One must also recognize that the cooling of the internal parts is not uniform across time, since the pins act as heat sinks, cooling the parts closest to the base/attached to the pins first.

If you want to pay extra for frozen tubes, be my guest. All you're really paying for is another way to weed out (or even create) bad/weak tubes.

But, hey, if it makes somebody's car payment to freeze tubes for people, who am I to judge?
Pretty much what I was going to say. Does it make a difference? Yes. Is it better? I have no clue.
blaren
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Re: Current Production Tube Compliment?

Post by blaren »

hmmm...kinda surprised to see no love for the shug 34Bs. A lot of marshall guys LOVE em (as NP goes at least).
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Structo
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Re: Current Production Tube Compliment?

Post by Structo »

Yeah, that was kind of my thoughts on the cryo tubes as well.
As rfgordon stated, different materials are going to react differently at different temperatures.
Different expansion and contraction rates to me sounds like a disaster for a vacuum tube.

But hey, it sounds cool (pun) and I'm sure some cork sniffers will love that and to be able to say, " My tubes are all cryogenically treated", will make there day. Probably even more so with the HiFi crowd, that will pay $500 for a wooden pot knob because of it's acoustic properties. :lol:
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Re: Current Production Tube Compliment?

Post by gearhead »

blaren wrote:hmmm...kinda surprised to see no love for the shug 34Bs. A lot of marshall guys LOVE em (as NP goes at least).
Really? Never heard that before, but guess I've been in the wrong forums. Are they sold as Shugs, or under a brand (Ruby has shug factory ones)?
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Re: Current Production Tube Compliment?

Post by CaseyJones »

rfgordon wrote:When things are deeply frozen, as in the cryogenic treatment, the crystalline structure can be altered a bit, which may or may not be desirable, depending on the thing being frozen and the way in which it is brought back to earth temperature.
In metallurgy i.e. "heat treat" the trick is to bring the temperature UP to the point where a particular crystalline structure is achieved. The part is then immediately chilled or "quenched" to preserve as much of that structure as possible. In machining the trick is to machine metal in its softer state then to harden the metal once major machining operations have been completed.

There may be intermediate stress relieving operations where the part is heated to a lesser temperature then cooled.

The parts can then be ground to finish tolerances, that compensates for warpage during the heat treat process, also, once the part is hardened it may be too hard to cut so it must be machined with abrasives i.e. "ground".

The reverse is annealing, the part is heated then slow cooled and ends up in its softened state. It can then be easily machined.

The average heat treater knows his alloys, atmospheric conditions and all sorts of alchemy to hit various temperature benchmarks to achieve a desired result.

Cryo has proven useful in some applications, for instance some cryo treated rifle barrels are measurably more accurate. Just because it works for one application doesn't make it applicable to every application. Its best application to tubes IMHO is to separate a phool from his money! :lol:
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Re: Current Production Tube Compliment?

Post by Lonely Raven »

I talked about this in another forum long ago when this cryo stuff first started coming to tubes.

I used to work with cryogenic tempering (as it's correctly called) in the late 80's through most of the 90's. Cryo tempering is more then just getting something really cold!

Remember that terminator movie with the liquid terminator, how they froze him and he shattered into a billion little pieces?? That's what happens when you freeze something too quickly, or unevenly. If glass were made cold very quickly, but not evenly, it would shatter.

Also, the speed at which the object is brought back up to room temp is very important. The freezers used for cryogenic tempering are capable of going below -200 degrees if needed, and bring the materials up to room temp at a speed of 1 degree an hour of necessary!!

All that said, tubes are not the right items to be cryo-tempered, and honestly, I don't believe it's possible without damaging the tube. At least, I don't feel it's possible to the depth of temps needed to really make changes in the crystalline structure on the molecular level...which is what cryogenic tempering is all about!

Now, we've done it to Porsche engine parts, 6 second 1/4 mile drag bike parts, mountain bike frames and wheels and cranks, swords, and especially knives...knives are a huge market currently for cryo tempering, though it doesn't always benefit all of them depending on the design of the blade and type of metal used. Hell, Dean Markly even had some guitar strings that were cryogenically tempered for longevity! (I never liked them). The only instrument that I've ever *really* believed gets a HUGE improvement with Cryo tempering, are brass instruments! It's practically magical in that application. They seem more harmonically rich, and all the valves seem to slide better. Slide trombones just feel like they were sliding on German ceramic bearings or something. Just truly amazing changes to brass instruments. Imagine being able to take any current production guitar and after cryo treatment it would sound rich like a well played 50 year old piece of wood. No shit.

Cryogenic tempering is a real thing, and it works on metal objects basically. I've had no success with anything else, and I wasn't even aware that glass could be put into a true cryogenic state. As mentioned above. it's really the application that makes a difference, it's not the end all fix all for everything.

Funny side story. The shop I used to work with (I didn't work for them, just with them) would cryo temper those cheap disposable razors, you know, the plastic ones you get 3 for a dollar? Anywho, after cryo treatment, the blades would last about a month before you had to throw the disposable razor out. That's how they promoted what cryo tempering could do. :)
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Re: Current Production Tube Compliment?

Post by BBQLS1 »

Neat story LR!
leaveitalone84
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Re: Current Production Tube Compliment?

Post by leaveitalone84 »

LR your job wouldn't have been on The Discovery Channels show called "The Next Step" by chance?

They were talking about the cyro treated razors when the went to a facility.
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Re: Current Production Tube Compliment?

Post by CaseyJones »

Lonely Raven wrote:Funny side story. The shop I used to work with (I didn't work for them, just with them) would cryo temper those cheap disposable razors, you know, the plastic ones you get 3 for a dollar? Anywho, after cryo treatment, the blades would last about a month before you had to throw the disposable razor out. That's how they promoted what cryo tempering could do. :)
I get a month out of those disposable razors anyway. 'Course I get a shave like the late Yasir Arafat by the third week.
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Re: Current Production Tube Compliment?

Post by Structo »

I have read about the benefits of cryo treating rifle barrels.
It makes some sort of sense about the molecular structure being more aligned or something.

Hey, maybe we could cryo treat some transistors so that the electrons could float in the crystal lattice better....... :lol: :lol:
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Re: Current Production Tube Compliment?

Post by dartanion »

I believe there is something to this, but I am pretty sure in a guitar amp it isn't going to have much of an effect. Well, maybe in some of the big Fenders!! :lol:

A friend of mine who is a huge audiophile asked me to get him some Cryo Treated KT88s for some old reference series HiFi amps to test them against the current non treated tubes and some NOS that he already had. He said they sounded the best out of the New Prod tubes and comparable with the NOS. Anyway, each mono amp used 8 KT88s!!! :shock: That's 16 KT88s for a retube!!!! :shock: :shock: :shock: :shock:
And he has multiple sets of NOS 6550 and KT88s :shock: :shock: :shock: :shock: :shock: :shock: :shock: :shock: :shock:
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Re: Current Production Tube Compliment?

Post by blaren »

Finally something I can relate to!!!....I'm a machinist. I've been hanging around here for a while now TRYING to relate to all the "over my head" amp talk and now people are speaking my language.
Oh...before I forget...the shugs are the Shuguang labelled EL34Bs. Their latest ones are the good ones. they've been making them for a long time over there but the new ones are supposed to be the shit. They LOOK good...welded plates and all...Hell for the price (~$12ea) they're worth a shot. Oh...it's the marshall guys who are saying good things. Maybe others too but I dont know.
Back to the good stuff. I do heat treating but have never done or learned about cryo tempering. If it's called tempering, you'd think it would be to remove hardness (slightly). I suppose the word COULD mean to slightly add hardness??
As was said, heating ferrous alloys that contain carbon to above the material's upper critical temperature (UCT) "dissolves" the "particles" of carbon into the metal. Rapid quenching "locks" all that carbon suspended evenly in the iron. Carbon is an alloy that gives steels hardness. When it's TOO hard though it becomes brittle...glass is HARD, and therefore brittle (I know, glass is actually a fluid but...I guess it's a HARD fluid). You dont want to make a hammer out of REAL hard steel....or glass. When you heat hardened material to below it's upper critical UCT and hold it there for a length of time, then quench it, you are tempering it....removing some hardness to increase it's "toughness" or resistance to impact.
Here's a cool trick. To find a steel's UCT, stick a magnet on it and start heating it. When the magnet falls off it's there. When magnetic steel reaches it's UCT, it looses it's magnetism. There are "proper" ways of measuring but not as fun :wink:
As was also said, heat treating isnt real friendly on things....even items made of just one material. They can deform, fracture,...all kinds of nasty shit. Heat treat a finished piece made of dissimilar materials and....
Speaking of Samurai swords....when they go into the fire they're straight. Quenching is what gives them the curve because the lower carbon steel along the back of the Katana contracts faster than the harder cutting edge.
Seems awfully odd that anything good would come out of freezing the hell out of an item made of coated parts inside a glass bulb with sealed pins. I used to be a painter and if you're putting a coating on something that's gonna get very hot and cold (expand and contract), the coating better be elastic or ductile.
Again though...I'm just a machinist. I know JACK about cryo anything other than Timothy Leary did too much acid. The only things I ever freeze are pieces of soft rubber to get them hard enough to cut or sleeves to fit housings.
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Re: Current Production Tube Compliment?

Post by Lonely Raven »

leaveitalone84 wrote:LR your job wouldn't have been on The Discovery Channels show called "The Next Step" by chance?

They were talking about the cyro treated razors when the went to a facility.
I didn't work for the cryo shop, but I worked with the cryo shop.

I'm pretty sure there was a show that interviewed the shop I worked with, but this was back in the late 80's early 90's. Was Discovery even around back then? If it was, then yeah, that was probably them. They had a cool name, something like

-241



I've not done any cryo in a while, I'm sure the tech has improved since the mid 90's which is when I last had anything to do with it.

A quick google came up with this:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Cryogenic_tempering

http://www.onecryo.com/

I think this *might* be the shop I worked with in the past. Or just one with a similar name:

http://www.300below.com/
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Re: Current Production Tube Compliment?

Post by Lonely Raven »

hahah, just found this as well:

http://www.greatrazors.com/
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