[SFDXA] One Man’s Quest to Revive the Great American Vacuum Tube...

[Bill]

****/from The Collins Collectors List:/**
*
One Man’s Quest to Revive the Great American Vacuum Tube*

*The prized retro audio components are mostly manufactured in Russia and 
China. Now, a small Georgia company is rebooting US production.*

*ROSSVILLE, GEORGIA, ON* the border with Tennessee, doesn’t look like a 
tech town. It’s the kind of place where homey restaurants promising 
succulent fried chicken and sweet tea are tucked among shuttered 
businesses and prosperous liquor stores. The cost of living is moderate, 
crime is high, politics are red, and the population has withered to 3,980.

But in the view of entrepreneur Charles Whitener, Rossville is the 
perfect place to stage a revival in US technology and 
manufacturing—albeit with a device that was cutting edge when the 
Ford Model A ruled the roads.

Whitener owns Western Electric, the last US manufacturer of vacuum 
tubes, those glass and metal bulbs that controlled current in electric 
circuits before the advent of the transistor made them largely obsolete. 
Tubes are still prized for high-end hi-fi equipment and by music gear 
companies such as Fender for their distinctive sound. But most of the 
world’s supply comes from manufacturers in Russia and China, which after 
the transistor era began in earnest in the 1960s helped sunset the US 
vacuum tube industry by driving down prices.

Whitener, a 69-year-old self-described inventor, vintage hi-fi 
collector, and Led Zeppelin fanatic, bought and revived AT&T’s shuttered 
vacuum tube business in 1995. The business has ticked along in the era 
of cheap overseas tubes primarily by serving the small market for vacuum 
tubes in premium hi-fi equipment with a model called the 300B, 
originally designed in 1938 to enable transoceanic phone calls.

Inspecting newly sealed vacuum tubes.

Inspecting newly sealed vacuum tubes. **

COURTESY OF WESTERN ELECTRIC

But recently US trade restrictions on Russia and China, over the 
former’s renewed invasion of Ukraine and the latter’s ideological 
disputes with Washington, have sent vacuum tube prices soaring. At one 
point in 2022, tubes that typically retailed for $10 were offered at 
prices over $100, says Daniel Liston Keller, who does public relations 
for recording industry clients. Although shipments of Russian tubes have 
resumed, prices remain high and the quality of overseas tubes has always 
been unreliable. “You have to buy 100 tubes to get 30 you like,” says 
Justin Norvell, an executive vice president at Fender. An affordable 
tube for a guitar preamp is now roughly $30, meaning the company can 
spend about $90 to get one tube that meets its standards.

Whitener has seized on the current moment of high prices as a chance to 
reinvigorate his company, the US tube industry, and even the idea of 
what a vacuum tube can be. Western Electric is currently working on a 
modernized tube design, an iteration of the all-but-obsolete technology 
fit for the 21st century. It’s an improved version of a tube called the 
12AX7, which is common in guitar preamps and other music gear—a market 
Whitener estimates is more than 10 times the size of the premium hi-fi 
business and is today served almost wholly by overseas suppliers. The 
recently high prices create economic cover, he calculates, to make a 
better version in Rossville that can be more reliable, durable, and 
economical than existing designs, turning the US into a powerhouse of 
vacuum tube technology again.

Assembling vacuum tubes by hand in Western Electrics factory in 
Rossville Georgia

Assembling vacuum tubes by hand in Western Electric’s factory in 
Rossville, Georgia

COURTESY OF WESTERN ELECTRIC

That makes Western Electric an oddball member of the swelling movement 
to bring technology manufacturing back to the US, assuring the supply of 
crucial products, such as computer chips and electric vehicle batteries, 
that are generally sourced overseas. The company is in the process of 
restructuring its factory floor with a combination of vintage and new 
machinery to turn out the modernized tubes, at the volumes Fender and 
other music companies need.

Whitener is a perfectionist. He aims to launch the 12AX7 this summer, 
but previous debuts have slipped. His factory is poised to make America 
the dominate source for audio vacuum tubes, improving the fortunes of 
Rossville, audiophiles, guitar heroes, domestic manufacturing, and 
Whitener himself—if he can just get the damn things out the door. “This 
landscape for the Russian tubes could change tomorrow,” he concedes. 
“It’s a Walmart world, and that’s a risk.”

*How Hard Can It Be?*

 From the 1920s through the 1950s, the American vacuum tube industry 
thrived. RCA, General Electric, Raytheon, and other manufacturers 
competed to invent and manufacture more reliable tubes, which were 
needed to regulate current and boost the faint signals from analog 
microphones and instruments enough to drive speakers. But the arrival of 
transistors, then circuit boards, made tubes obsolete for most uses. 
American manufacturers couldn’t match prices from overseas. Factories 
closed. Engineers moved on.

Many musicians and audio obsessives stayed loyal to the tube but 
increasingly got them from outside the US. Russia and China became the 
leading suppliers, with companies such as Shuguang Electron 
Group cranking out tube designs established between the 1930s and 1950s, 
such as the 6L6 and EL34.

By the time Charles Whitener took a career break in 1990, the US did not 
make any consumer audio tubes. He thought about changing that after 
noticing a steady stream of ads in hi-fi magazines offering Western 
Electric 300Bs, a design from 1938 that was popular with audio 
enthusiasts. Whitener was looking for a new venture after using his 
experience in his father’s yarn factory to invent a quality control 
system for the fiber optics industry that he then sold. “I thought, how 
hard can it be to make these tubes?,” he says. “People are willing to 
pay $1200 to $1500 a pop for them.”

Predictably, it was harder than Whitener thought. It took him two years 
to persuade AT&T, which hadn’t made a tube since 1988 but still owned 
Western Electric, to license the brand and sell him its 
tube-manufacturing equipment. He set up shop in Western Electric’s 
former tube factory in Kansas City, Missouri, where the mothballed 
machines were stored.

After a fortuitous meeting with retired AT&T employees on a visit to 
Bell Labs, Whitener combed the northeast tracking down veterans of the 
storied facility, Sylvania, and RCA who knew the arcana of tube-making. 
When his factory started production of 300Bs in 1996, almost all of his 
20 or so employees were tube-manufacturing veterans.

Western Electric was up and running again, but in 2003 AT&T sold the 
building. Whitener moved the company to Huntsville, Alabama, a NASA 
stronghold with skilled workers that was 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 modernizing vacuum 
tube designs that are more than 70 years old.

Whitener’s team devised a way to apply an atom-thick layer of graphene 
to a vacuum tube’s anode to extend its lifespan by improving heat 
dissipation and reducing contaminating gases. Those enhanced tubes hit 
the market in 2020. Quality control—Whitener’s former field—became more 
automated, and he claims more than 90 percent of tubes now pass 
inspection off the line.

Western Electric sells pairs of 300Bs in a cherry wood presentation box 
with a certificate charting their performance characteristics and a 
generous five-year warranty—yours for $1,500. Copycat sets of 300Bs, 
offered at the same price, are sold with a 30-day warranty. Most tubes 
have a warranty of just 90 days.

Whitener has spent more than a decade preparing for Western Electric’s 
next act. In 2006, he won an auction for machinery and tooling needed to 
make 12AX7 tubes; the pieces had started life in Blackburn, England 
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=GDvF89Bh27Y>, but were then in Serbia. 
It took five years of legal battles with a competing bidder before the 
intervention of then-Tennessee  senator Bob Corker and the US Embassy, 
Whitener says, gave him possession. (Corker, reached via a staffer, did 
not dispute Whitener’s characterization.)

Today that equipment is being installed on Whitener’s factory floor, 
along with additional machines shipped over from Slovakia in 2007. New 
machines that will automate processes like the hand-bending of wires 
needed to make 12AX7 tubes are being peppered in. All the while, Western 
Electric continues to produce 300Bs. Depending on the day of the week, 
the space may clickety-clack to the sound of a lathe winding molybdenum 
wire around side rods, or the ragged hiss of gas flames heating and 
sealing glass bulbs.

*Very Pleasant Distortion*

The promise of better sound is, like most things among high-fidelity 
fanatics, subject to vicious debate. Some hear vast differences between 
brands of tube, or even individual tubes of the same make and model. 
Others will tell you each tube is indistinguishable from the next. Most 
agree that tubes in general have a sound that transistors, circuit 
boards, and algorithms can only approximate, one often described as 
warm, rich, or even romantic.

“Tubes just distort things in a very pleasant way,” said Daniel Schlett, 
a sound engineer whose Brooklyn studio, Strange Weather, is known for 
the analog punch it gets from tube-powered mics, amps, consoles, and 
equalizers. Artists who have sought Schlett’s hallmark sound are as 
diverse as Ghostface Killah, Booker T. (of MGs fame), and The War on 
Drugs. “Tubes are part of the equation,” Schlett says. “It’s big and 
amplified, and it has the voodoo on it.”

A delicate 15inch ribbon of nickel makes up the filament at the heart of 
Western Electric's current model the 300B.

A delicate 15-inch ribbon of nickel makes up the filament at the heart 
of Western Electric's current model, the 300B.

COURTESY OF WESTERN ELECTRIC

But voodoo is exactly the problem, say tube skeptics like Glenn Fricker, 
an engineer of 25 years who specializes in metal bands at Spectre Sound 
Studio in Ontario, Canada. He sometimes uses a 1966 amp with its 
original tubes, but he doubts expensive replacement tubes would improve 
the sound.

“As a kid we are led to believe there is some dark art in tubes which 
will inherently change the sound of your amp,” Fricker says. But when he 
devised an experiment using sound canceling 
<https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=VaO7MmghoqA> to reveal the audible 
differences between tubes, all he uncovered was “a little clicking 
sound”—they were otherwise identical. He advises guitar slingers to skip 
the $1,300 vintage Telefunken “Diamond Bottom” 12AX7 online at Tube 
Depot for the $20 JJ brand from Slovakia. While Fricker is rooting for 
Western Electric, he says, “Are they going to sound any better than your 
dear, cheap JJs? No.”

Price spikes during the recent great tube panic suggest plenty of people 
still believe in the voodoo. That presents Whitener with an immense 
opportunity. He says he aims to launch Western Electric’s 12AX7, 
America’s first new tube in decades, this summer. After that he plans to 
add a string of additional models, versions of the 6L6, EL34, EL84 12 
AT7, and 6V6 tubes—a lineup he calculates makes up almost 80 percent of 
the relevant music equipment, such as guitar and studio amps. If all 
goes to plan, the US could once again dominate vacuum tube manufacturing.

Whitener concedes that he’s taking a big risk. Russia looks determined 
to keep attacking Ukraine, keeping trade embargoes in place, and 
China-US relations remain tense. But the geopolitics of vacuum tubes 
could shift again. It’s unclear how loyal people might be to his US-made 
tubes.

Whitener hopes that even if international supply prices drop, customers 
will stick with Western Electric after having gotten a taste of the 
reliably durable tubes. “They are looking for a stable product they can 
count on,” he says. Schlett, the sound engineer, is hoping Whitener can 
deliver. “My advice is please, quality control, please, please, please,” 
he said. “I don’t want to throw out 70 percent of the $180 tubes I buy. 
That’s not OK.”

*/Joseph W. Koester/W4NSA/*

*/1020 Huron Drive/*

*/Crossville, TN 38572/*

*/931.788.1360 Home/*

*/931.200.0243 Mobile/*

*/jwkoest at .../*

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