JJ 2A3-40 Review

The review below was received in January of 2013.  "Well, Ike persuaded me to choose the JJ 2A3-40 tubes for my PB-built amp, and Eurotubes.com got them to me in two days along with a six- month warranty. I took the time to treat the tubes and sockets of my preamp and amp with DeoxIT & PresevIT; and began listening. The Waterlily "Saudades" CD was first up with the "Transiçao" track going deeper than before with more skin sound to the drums, and the bowed acoustic bass yielding up wonderful rosiny sounds... superb! Next up was "Super Bass 2" with Ray Brown, John Clayton, and Christian McBride trading riffs with each other on acoustic basses. On the "Mysterioso" track the differences in timbre between the three basses were clearly presented, and again the rosiny quality of the bowed bass was lovely. "A Meeting by the River" on Waterlily began with "Ganges Delta Blues", with Ry Cooder trading slide riffs with V. M. Bhatt on Viná, and Joachim Cooder accompanying on a dumdek along with the tablas. The sound of the Viná clearly different from Cooder's slide guitar, and the harmonics of the stopped strings beautiful. The Hawaiian tune "Isa Lei" utterly relaxed and lovely. Finally, Mahler's "Der Abscheid" from "Das Lied von der Erde" gave forth glorious attacks in the brass, very deep tympani, and 'you are there' vocals from Michelle DeYoung. Well, if this first audition is any indication, I am going to enjoy these tubes for a long time; and they do seem to bring some of the 300B 'sound' to my amp. Thanks, Ike!"  Hank Murrow, Eugene, OR Here are a couple shots of Hank's custom built rig.