Sylvania now: “Just throw that piece of shit in the trash and buy a new one”
I worked at a grocery store that still had one of these in the mid 90s. It had been there since the 60s but no one who worked there still knew how to use it.
I remember when the local Safeway had one of these! I’m pretty sure that was in the '70s, though. It’s just slightly possible that I might be old.
Some folks are still using tubes for audio equipment aren’t they?
Vacuum tubes are super common in high-end guitar amplifiers
Not just guitar audio! I own a tube amp for my guitar and 2 tube amps for driving my higher-end headphones! They are neat little pieces of electronics history, not just in how they run, but also because most of the best tubes are old military surplus. My oldest pair are from 1945 and were made for early army/navy radar systems.
I’ve got a tube amp and a tube DAC/ headphone amp for my HiFi system. They sound amazing.
Yes, I’m a reseller. I bought a large collection of them from a pawn shop that was closing. Some of them are quite sought after. The most expensive I’ve sold were $200/ea. Some sellers use higher end testers in order to make claims that the tubes are “matched” in their percentage of specification from new. I think it’s a dubious claim. I have a cheaper tester that says if they’re good or not. I only state that they are tested and appear to be new since I obviously have no way to know if they actually are NOS or if someone used them at some point.
They are still commonly used in RF amplifiers for ham radio too.
I actually have a similar model for testing audio tubes. I have several 100 watt amplifier heads for my guitars and a few more home built amps for both guitar and listening audio. I even have several tube preamps I’ve designed with one or two tubes.
Such a cool era of technology to me.
I bet there’s somebody somewhere that knows why the three bottom left sockets are red.
Finding a less potato image of this device on Google, the red sockets are not testing sockets but “pin straighteners”
You can test the tubes yourself, it’s called tubing. So YouTube
