Joint effort between Audio Note UK and Psvane, amazing new 211 and 300B tubes

My WE reissues are from around that era, possibly a little later. I bought my pair from Tonepub as he wasn't using them; and a year or so later he bought a headphone amp that used 300Bs and wanted to buy the Western Electrics back. I know that I will never own the engraved base ones like you own, Steve. Therefore I will never know what I am missing. Ignorance is bliss.

 

The guy I got my Jinro from was a former AN Dealer. I asked him if he thought the M6 would work well with the Jinro and he thought I was crazy to put ANY AN Pre-Amp with the Jinro. It was his opinion to just use the Jinro as is. Just throwing that out there.

 

I can definitely say that adding either my m6 or my m8 to my Ongaku made a huge difference so if you have an M2 or M3 it would be a worthwhile addition to a Jinro. An M6 might be overkill, however if you see upgrading, an M6 would be worth considering. It also put me in good place when I swapped out the Ongaku for the Ongaku Kensei...

 

Very interesting. I wonder why there was such a difference in fundamentally the same architecture???

 

Well it's not that hard to try it both ways and see what you like - I have liked the M3 and M6 into the Jinro and at most audio shows they usually have one of those two preamps running the Jinro - there is a Jinro Sochu dedicated power amp version though that is specifically designed as a power amp only version - but it is dramatically more expensive than the regular Jinro and does less - so...

The problem with the Jinro by itself is there is no phono stage. So you still have to then buy something with a phono stage - hence M3 or M6Phono (or higher).

As they say in for a penny in for a pound - Audio Note also makes the Onkoru II monoblocks which seems to me to be Andy Grove's Pet monoblock 211s. I heard them once on a set of Einstein speakers and I went back the next week and they were sold - LOL - I liked them but it was hard to really tell because those Einstein speakers are nowhere near as good as the AN E (any AN E) and they cost like $50k. But anyway.

I really like the Active preamp of the M3/M6 over the leaner (and yes perhaps more accurate to some) sound of bypassing that stage. But big rich dynamics of the M3 and up I don't want to take out. But Jinro Sochu is very expensive (I suspect because of the balanced transformers) and Onkaru II - umm well two full Jinro cases - yikes. Empress Silver Sigs are looking like the bargoon. Still would like to try a Neiro. I believe this is less expensive than Jinro and Neiro is level 4 not level 3. You get the better transformer quality - A Tomei equivalent.

 

Many thanks Steve, one thing that I have to confess is that I gave you the wrong price, I am truly embarassed about this, normally Psvane always gives us prices in pairs of the output tubes, in this case they priced the 4242E and the forthcoming 4300E in single units, so my price is double of what I thought it was, embarassing I agree but what can I say?

Apart from tellg you all that I got this wrong and the correct price is double what Steve quotes above for a pair.

BTW, the 4300E is still in development, it will be at least 5 - 6 months before we will have final production, without going into too much detail there are problems with the coating of the plate which needs sorting out in order to optimise the benefit of the Molybdenum anode.

Peter
:-(

 

Hi Peter - will you be making 2a3 versions with Psvane as well?

And does anyone know how to pronounce Psvane - I keep saying P.S. Vain.

 

An Audio Note collaboration for a better 6SN7 would be neat as well. Psvane has been doing 6SN7/CV181 variants, but have been missing the mark a bit. An Audio Note version might nudge the sound in the right direction.

 

I had a quad of the Phillips Replica EL34's from Psvane and found them to be unacceptably bright and got rid of them after a few weeks. Now if AN wants to help them make one that would be a different story!

 

+1. I gave them plenty of time too. The only change was tarnish on the tube bases.

 

$560 a pair was a stunning number, too good to be true in this day and age.

 

Billion$Baby, to use a pre-amplifier like the M6 you would need to bypass the first stage and the volume control, that way the JINRO essentially becomes a power amplifier proper, there is too much gain with the extra stage.

Metralla, sadly I misread the invoice from Psvane when I costed the 4242E, they normally always price in pairs when invoicing power tubes, but for whatever reason the 4242E is priced per piece, so the actual price for a pair is around $ 1,100.00, which when all is said and done is not offensive although it would have been nice if it was half that!

Sincerely,
Peter

 

Thanks VERY much for taking the time to explain the situation I would be facing Peter! Much appreciated

 

Thanks for replying Peter. My personal interest is with the 300Bs. When you have any info on those valves, please let us know.

 

According to AN UK’s Facebook page the new 211’s are now available for purchase. The new 300B is due in the first half of 2019.

Link to fb post: Audio Note (UK) Ltd

 

Exciting news! I would love to try these new 300B's in a future amp build!

 

I'm new to this forum and this is my first post.

I was very lucky to be an early customer in the UK for these new Audio Note AN4242E tubes.

Although I've only got a few hours on my tubes, I can say they really do produce a spectacular sound! I have been using Elrog ER211's (silver wired) and Psvane 211 T2's and these AN's are in a different league. In my amps they have a level of transparency I could not have dreamed possible. The scale they give to music is specialsand don't get me started on the bottom end!
I cannot wait for them to settle in.

 

Thank you for the mini-review. It sounds like AN and Psvane have a winner.

 

I'll post an update when they've had a few more hours on them. Highly recommended so far!

 

Welcome to the Forum and thanks for that post!