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GEAR TREND | BY DAN DALEY
WILL AMPS GET
THEIR TUBES TIED?
ock ’n’ roll vs.
the mob,” is how
Mike Matthews
described his
alleged troubles
with the Russian Mafia earlier
this year. Matthews, founder of
early stompbox maker ElectroHarmonix and technology confederate of Jimi Hendrix, built
products in the 1960s and ’70s,
like the Big Muff distortion box,
that revolutionized how electric
guitars sound. More recently, he
has been embroiled in a lengthy
and potentially dangerous battle
within the still-vague business
landscape of post-Cold War
Russia.
Various entities, including the
military, had been threatening to
hijack a factory in Saratov,
Russia, where Matthews set up
shop several years ago to make
vacuum tubes for guitar ampli-
“R
Vacuum tubes
are a hot
commodity in
a business
fascinated with
vintage gear.
They’re also a
source of
tension for
their leading
manufacturer
fiers and high-end audiophile
equipment. A recent ruling by a
Russian court in Matthews’
favor may help resolve the situation. But what is certain is that
Matthews — under the business
name ExpoPul — has created a
business with estimated annual
revenues of more than $7 million that churns out what most
people would consider artifacts
of a bygone electronic age. That’s
except for guitar purists, who
consider his wares the sonic gold
standard.
OLD WORLD TECHNOLOGY
alking about tubes with
those who live by them can
elicit emotional responses.
Arguments will erupt about
whether newly made tubes can
match the performance of
“new original stock,” known to
insiders as NOS — tubes made
by major manufacturers like
RCA, Sylvania and GE back in
the heyday of tubes that are
still in their original packaging.
Vacuum tubes began to
decline in popularity in the 1960s
T
with the ascendancy of the solidstate transistor. The guitar amp
industry embraced the transistor
in the ’70s, as did the larger consumer electronics business, for its
lower cost and lighter weight.
Guitar amps were still a significant market for tubes throughout
this period, but as consumer electronics makers abandoned the
tube, their manufacturing base
contracted severely.
By the ’80s, only the Sovietled Warsaw Pact forces still
relied on vacuum tubes, in part
because dictatorships viewed
new technologies as threatening
to their grip on power. It was
also because, ironically, tubes
could better withstand the electromagnetic pulse generated by
a nuclear explosion, which
would fry solid-state circuits.
But tubes made a comeback
in the ’90s as the vintage-sound
trend exploded. Guitar players
wanted to play classic instruments through tube-powered
amplifiers. Still, there weren’t
many places to get those tubes
outside Russia, Slovakia and
China, where low-cost labor
made their manufacture potentially profitable. As demand
increased, Matthews upped his
production from 40,000 tubes
per month in 1999 to 170,000
per month in 2005, according to
a report in the New York Times.
The factory employed nearly
1,000 workers as of the middle
of last year, supplying companies like Fender and Korg.
AMPS DRIVING TUBE MARKET
ubes have become a small
but significant niche product
for music product retail. While
tube amps are not differentiated
in NAMM’s market statistics,
the guitar amp sector as a whole
has seen unit sales more than
double in the last eight years,
with sales up more than 30 percent in 2004 alone, the last year
for which data are available.
The fact that a tube business
exists at all is due to the continued popularity of tube-driven
amps, according to J.C. Morrison,
senior design engineer at New
Sensor, the parent company for
Electro-Harmonix and a group of
classic tube brand names, such
as Mullard and Tung-sol.
(Matthews trademarked the
names after their copyrights had
expired, along with ones that
reflect tube’s more recent origins,
such as Sovtek and Svetlana.)
“Tubes never went away,
but the reason they exist is the
guitar amplifier industry,” he
said. “For every 6L6 tube used
by the hi-fi industry, there are
200 used in guitar amps.”
However, Morrison is candid
about the fact that the continuing supply of tubes depends on
several factors, including access
to cheap labor and the political
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52 | MUSIC INC. | FEBRUARY 2007
climates in Eastern Europe and
Asia. “If our Russian plant had
been closed, it would have had
serious repercussions for the
entire industry,” he said, noting
that New Sensor brands supply
virtually every major guitar
amp maker and are used in
many of the boutique amps.
According to the New York
Times, ExpoPul is estimated to
supply as much as two-thirds of
the vacuum tubes used in musical instrument applications
worldwide. “And if the standard
of living were higher in the
places where tubes are made,
there would be no tubes.” That’s
because, Morrison said, major
amp makers buy in quantity,
and that depresses pricing.
“They’re just cheap because
they can be,” he said, pointing
out that large companies, which
order in lots of 100,000 at a
time, refuse to pay more than
$2.50 per 6L6 tube, a price he
said would make manufacturing
in the West unsustainable.
Some of the few manufacturing sites outside New
Sensor’s orbit, such as Serbia,
are also deteriorating and may
fall to the onslaught of new
economies in those regions,
according to Morrison. Still,
he’s optimistic and said supply
and demand in the tube trade is
well balanced at the moment.
Aspen Pittman, founder
a n d p re s i d e n t o f G ro ove
Tubes, one of the industry’s
major tube product and service suppliers, agreed that quality has increased and demand
remains solid. But he’s also
wa r y o f a t e n u o u s s u p p l y
chain. “[Russia] has two governments — the one you see
and the one you don’t see,” he
said. “The one you don’t see is
the one Mike [Matthews] has
been having trouble with.”
Groove Tubes, which used
to manufacture its own tubes in
a joint-venture factory in the
Buyers can
interpret a
good selection
of tubes as a
sign that a
store can
help them
personalize
and fine-tune
their amp’s
sound
former Czechoslovakia, and
later in its own boutique
California factory, now buys
from the four remaining makers, including Matthews. But
the limited diversity of supply,
the need for quasi-exotic raw
materials and a complicated
manufacturing process keep the
supply chain potentially fragile.
Groove Tubes handles the
outsourced quality-control
task for Fender and Ampeg,
and Pittman said rejects run
as high as 15 percent for power
tubes and as much as 50 percent for pre-amp tubes. But
the payoff is a highly reliable
tube-amp sector that buyers
keep returning to and growing
demand for. (He mentioned
that Groove Tubes’ sales have
increased nearly 10 percent a
year for the past three years.)
“In a production run of
20,000 tubes, as much as 25 percent of them may not pass inspection,” he said. “But the buying
public only sees the ones that do,
and those are very, very good.”
A LARGE NICHE MARKET
his is also good for MI retailers, for which tubes are a
necessary component to tubeamp sales. Pittman said retail
pricing has been increasing and
that the market has been accept-
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ing those increases.
It’s expensive to retube an
amp, as much as $150 for a full
complement of power and preamp tubes, he estimated. But guitarists often want to hot-rod their
amps and are always in search of
the elusive “vintage” tones.
Buyers can interpret a good selection of tubes as a sign that a store
can help them personalize and
fine-tune their amp’s sound.
“It’s a pretty good market —
a large niche market,” said
Chris Cobb, a partner at San
Francisco’s Real Guitars, of the
tube business for his store. Cobb
is an aficionado — he owns as
many as 20 amplifiers personally — and he prefers vintage
tubes that he finds scouring
eBay and other Internet sources.
(A pair of NOS RCA 6L6 tubes
in mint condition can cost more
than $300, while a new pair
made in China costs about $25.)
“Then I hoard them,” he
said. “But I’m unlike most of
this market in that way. Most
of the tubes made today are
good, and they’re getting better.
We do well with them because
they go along with what we
specialize in, which is classic
guitars and vintage amps.”
Teddy Gordon, owner of
Make’n Music, a Chicago combo
retailer, said guitarists will often
swap out tubes to change their
sound, and that fact has made
tube sales brisk there. “They
have a better markup than
strings,” he said. “But they go
along with amp sales. If I had to
sell them as just an accessory,
I’m not sure I’d do as well.”
As long as the guitar remains
the iconic instrument of the
times, the expansion of guitar
amp sales means some percentage of those buyers will eventually become avid enough to
begin experimenting with their
tube arrays. But it’s still worth
keeping up with current events
to monitor the supply chain. MI