> The prices are pretty expensive
Which prices?
The power tubes are priced per Pair, matched, some of them burned-in. $45/$60 for a pair of 2A3 seems very fair to me. $15 for a pair of 6L6GC is very cheap, cheaper than a pair of their 6V6 which is silly (I guess they sell a LOT of 6L6).
The fancy tubes like 211: these are the prices that fancy-tube buyers want to pay. It is in fact harder to make a 300 or 211 than a 2A3 or 6L6. And if the price were too low, nobody would touch them.
Chinese tube makers can make good or bad tubes. They have some rickety facilities and some that made military-reliability tubes. Depends mostly on what you (actually the distributor) wants to pay. If you ask "How cheap can I get tubes?" you will get cheap bottles. If you emphasize quality over price, they can do very good work.
Only time will tell if they have the million-hour life of the best US/EUR production of the 1950s. However if they will sell a 6L6 in 2005 for less than I paid in 1970, despite decades of inflation, who cares?
> had a cigarette butt inside of it.
The gettering process would have cremated anything organic. So either someone negotiated a price that was SO low, the workers got snitty and made a "special"; or someone PhotoShopped it.
>> Pay 25 USD setup fee
>> Order min 200 tubes
>> Voila, you just created a new tube brand.
> Hey how's about a group buy for 6386
A new "brand", not a new (for that factory) tube-TYPE.
Sure, Alex could throw down a few thousand dollars and a logo, introduce "the Alex-Tubes 6L6". Set up a website, say why Alex-Tubes are The BEST, show a picture of Alex personally inspecting each tube for cigar-butts, Order Now!
But to get an odd-ball type made is a lot tougher. One of the better Chinese factories does have an old guru who will study a tube and clone it. Working without the original developer blueprints, notes, and background knowledge, he has to make many many samples, test, refine, and try again. Some of the sexiest types are only possible on cutting-edge tooling: stuff that the US companies with massive military contracts had, but a small factory doing low-bid guitar tubes won't have such precision tooling and can't afford to pay the Swiss a million bucks to modify a transformer or textile winder into a precision grid winder. That's why you are not going to see a new-made 8417 or 417. Heck, even major US operations in the 1960s had trouble making reliable 8417. You may recall that the very popular 7591 was one of the last mass-market output tubes to be cloned: it is just a mini-6L6 except the grid is very close to the cathode, too close for most shops to wind.
