Predictably, it was harder than Whitener thought. It took him two years to convince AT&T, which hasn’t made projector lamps since 1988 but still owns Western Electric, to license the brand and sell him projector equipment. He set up shop at Western Electric’s former tube factory in Kansas City, Missouri, where broken machines were kept.
After a chance encounter with retired AT&T employees during a visit to Bell Labs, Whitener traveled across the northeast in search of veterans of the long-established facility, Sylvania and RCA, who knew the know-how of manufacturing. tube. When his factory started producing 300Bs in 1996, nearly all of his 20 or so employees were tube production veterans.
Western Electric resumed operations, but in 2003 AT&T sold the building. Whitener moved the company to Huntsville, Alabama, a NASA stronghold of skilled workers, convenient for his tube contracts with the Department of Defense. In 2008, he moved the company to Rossville, Georgia. It was there that he began to modernize vacuum tube designs that were over 70 years old.
Whitener’s team devised a way to apply an atom-thick layer of graphene to the anode of a vacuum tube to extend its life by improving heat dissipation and reducing polluting gases. Those innovative tubes will hit the market in 2020. Quality control—Whitener’s former domain—has become more automated, and he claims more than 90% of the tubes have now passed off-line testing. pass.
Western Electric sells the 300B pairs in a cherry wood display case with a certificate indicating their performance characteristics and a generous five-year warranty—yours for $1,500. The 300Bs copycat set, offered for the same price, is sold with a 30-day warranty. Most tubes have a warranty of only 90 days.
Whitener spent more than a decade preparing for Western Electric’s next move. In 2006, he won an auction for the machinery and tools needed to produce 12AX7 pipes; The pieces began life in Blackburn, England, but after that are in Serbia. It took five years of legal battles with a competing contractor before the intervention of then-Tennessee Senator Bob Corker and the U.S. Embassy, Whitener said, gave him the right, Whitener said. own. (Corker, approached through an employee, does not contest Whitener’s characterization.)
Today, that equipment is being installed on Whitener’s factory floor, along with additional machines shipped from Slovakia in 2007. The new machines will automate processes such as bending wire by hand. required for the production of 12AX7 tubes is being brought in. At the same time, Western Electric continued to produce 300Bs. Depending on the day of the week, the space can give off the rattle of a lathe as molybdenum coils wind around the sidebars, or the hiss of a gas flame heating and sealing glass bulbs.
The deformation is very pleasant
The promise of better sound, like most things among high-fidelity fanatics, is the subject of fierce debate. Some hear huge differences between hose brands, or even individual hoses of the same make and brand. Others will tell you it is impossible to distinguish each tube from the next. Most agree that tubes in general have a sound that transistors, boards, and algorithms can only estimate, which is often described as warm, rich, or even romantic.
Daniel Schlett, a sound engineer at Brooklyn studio Strange Weather, known for the analog punch that comes from tube-powered microphones, amplifiers, consoles and equalizers, said: just distorts things in a very pleasing way. Artists who sought out Schlett’s signature sound were as diverse as Ghostface Killah, Booker T. (of MG fame) and The War on Drugs. “The tubes are part of the equation,” says Schlett. “It’s big and amplified, and it has a curse on it.”
