Quote:
Originally Posted by jdandy
Charles.......Have you ever checked to see if the 12AX7's in the C2300 are the McIntosh branded JJ's or the McIntosh branded Made in China tubes they used for awhile? The Chinese tubes that came in my first C2300 and second C2300 were less than satisfactory to me. I now use Gold Lion gold pin 12AX7's in my line stage and NOS Telefunken ECC83 smooth plate 12AX7's in the phono stage. It produced a huge improvement in a lower noise floor, and a superior sound across the entire frequency range. If you are running the Made in China tubes, I would replace them no matter how many hours are on them.
If the 12AX7's are the McIntosh branded JJ tubes, you can expect 5,000 to 6,000 hours, perhaps even a bit longer before they begin to get noisy.
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Hello Dan,
I have the "Made in China" tubes in the phono section. I use the 2300 as a line stage, which is where the JJ ECC803s tubes are. NPR sounded pretty good today, so I'm not in a big hurry to swap out tubes, but if/when I do I thought I'd make a clean sweep, perhaps buy something low-noise and inexpensive to replace the "China" tubes.
The JJs are too noisy to use in a phono section I think, but would that affect the line stage any?
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