Hello,
One of the ECL-86 valves on my new to me Audio Innovations AI300 has gone pop.
So, I’m not sure if the amp is auto bias and I can just drop in a n other, or if I need to replace a pair / quad.
Whatever, does anybody have a spare / spares (as needed) that they are happy to sell ?
Cheers.
I have a few mullard and Philips ones,but all untested
If they don’t need to be matched Stu, I’ll take a chance. Maybe Guy @murrayjohnson could chirp in ?
The pentode parts of the ecl86s should really be matched for current draw (at a given bias point) and for Gm. D2 (effectively gain). So if you can find a seller with a matched pair, that’d be ideal.
There are fewer of them about these days, you would need to ask the various wholesellers what they have.
Good luck buying ones that are actually or honestly matched these days
Better off buying a shit load and matching them yourself.
Unfortunately that’s well above my pay grade.
I think it was above my old valve testers paygrade without wiring up some kind of adaptor. I don’t think it could do ecl86s last time I tried. They came along after it was built.
Looks like it could present a problem then.
Newer valve testing machines can do it but mine dates just too early. I’m sure an adaptor could be made wiring a 9 pin socket to an 8 pin valve base & it’d be possible to work out which connection from the ECL86 should go to which pin on the 8 pin base such that the tester could be fooled into thinking it was testing an octal based pentode such as the 6V6 or somesuch.