I lived in Cape Town, South Africa, during the 1980s, and I was buying all the Quad II tube (valve) power amps I could find — I ended up with 8 of them, and 8 of the Quad 57 electrostatic speakers. I wanted to test all the tubes and the only place that could do it had nothing to do with Audio: it serviced the world's merchant marine fleet — Cape Town is one of the few major commercial harbors in the southern hemisphere, 7,000 kilometers to South America, 11,000 km to Australia — long distances through the roughest seas in the world.
The owner got really excited every time I came in because I was such a switch from his normal routine, and he tested my tubes for free. His tube tester was serious — 10 feet long and 3 feet wide with hundreds of sockets, dials and knobs and meters.
He told me that Russian ships came in almost daily, from their fishing fleets to their freighters and tankers. They all had ship-to-shore radios that were still tube-based, and they had to test their tubes every landfall. And those radios were on 24/7, the law of the sea, they never knew when some fellow mariner might be sending an SOS, and they had to be on duty and on-air to hear the message and sail to the rescue.
He said he'd tested thousands of Russian tubes, and never found a bad one — and some were 60 years old, and been on the whole time. They didn't have "planned obsolescence" like the US and UK products, built to fail to make customers keep buying new ones.
I don't know if today's Russian tubes are as robust as the ones from the old Soviet era, nor if that would be a good thing for high-end audio purposes, because they were designed to withstand the pounding of gale-force waves crashing into their hulls, not to sit on sorbothane isolation pods in your living room — and to hear Morse code or a cry of distress at vocal frequencies, not to reproduce the subtle rubato of Heifetz's G-string.
The reason all our tubes today are from Russia or China is because their electronics still relied on tubes long after the West transistorized — one reason their economies fell behind — and they still have the skills and machines to make tubes, whereas we sold all ours for scrap.
