Amperex

Amperex 12AU7A Tubes Long Plate Foil D-getter - Rogers Label - Holland 1958

Name: Amperex 12AU7A Tubes Long Plate Foil D-getter - Rogers Label - Holland 1958
Brand: Amperex
SKU: 266385292921
Price: 318.0 USD
Availability: InStock

Amperex 12AU7A Tubes Long Plate Foil D-getter - Rogers Label - Holland 1958

$318.00 USD

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Perfect matched pair of vintage Amperex 12AU7A Long Plates Foil D-getter tubes - Made in Holland - 1958 - Same date code - Very 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 pair 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: Woo Audio WA7 Fireflies (3rd gen) Balanced Headphone Amplifier

- Output: Focal Clear MG Pro open-back headphones

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

Professional Tube Testing

Both tubes tested Strong (85%+ nominal mutual conductance) on a Mercury 2000 tube tester with the following result (mutual conductance in uMhos):

Tube 1: 2,620/2,600

Tube 2: 2,390/2,790

Good tubes start at 2,000 and new tubes (incl. NOS/NIB) 3,000, and the 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 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

Besides the world-class sound characteristics, we still treasure this pair for its near pristine cosmetic condition given the tubes' age - over 90% of the paint is still intact on both tubes, and the identical French military tube date codes etched in glass are perfectly visible:

K6I delta 8H (K6I = Change code, delta = Heerlen, Holland, 8 = 1958, H=September)