Raising The Tone - Factory Fresh Tone

The Final Part Of Our Feature On Tone Sees Adrian Emsley Explaining How To Choose New Valves For Your Amp.

- Jamie Dickson

Last month, we joined Orange’s amp design guru Adrian Emsley for tips on how to avoid duds when buying secondhand valves. This month, we join forces again to focus on the many brand-new valves that are available on the market.

If your amp is being gigged hard, it’s likely you’ll need to change your power valves every two years or so. But while there are a plethora of replacement valve brands on the market, there aren’t actually that many factories that still make valves any more. While we continue to love the way they sound in guitar gear, valves have vanished from nearly all other types of consumer electronics, meaning demand for their manufacture is only a fraction of what it was in the 1950s.

“There are a couple of factories in China, there’s the JJ factory in the Czech Republic, there’s the Reflector factory in Russia… and I think there’s still some stuff being made in the US for the military. But that is pretty much it,” Adrian explains. “That’s all that’s actually being made, so most of the umbrella brands you see on the market are just ‘matchers’ who will select tubes for [low] microphony, grade them and then brand them. And they will also match output tubes together – to varying degrees of effectiveness, to be honest.”

Adrian adds that, while all the remaining factories produce decent valves, some are particularly good at making one type of valve in particular.