Here are some breakthrough projects from AVVT.   Today,  with the disappearance of that company,  we must put those projects already in the hall of history again.  Time flies too fast.  To make sure these projects don't get forgotten, and then afterwards being claimed as someone's else great products,  I will  take some time here, to list the recent history of the some AVVT tube projects I did with Alesa Vaic.

Alesa Vaic never was the kind of person who is afraid of a risk.  It was in 1998 when I  first proposed the idea to Alesa to make a 2A3 tube, but  he said  this project  was too much of challenge. When Alesa said so, you bet it is just that.  Well at least not with the  existing tools, he said.  Some tools that he would have needed have got lost in legal struggle with his former partner from Italy. Without those tools, it could not be done.

We put a questionnaire on the AVVT website, where people could reserve those tubes,  in case we would make them.  Well that was my first marketing lesson,  never build a  "nice-to-have" tube that DIY say they need. What they need, is everything what is not for sale. The harder it is to get, the harder they say they "need" it. Then when you invest your time and money for the reissue, and after it is for sale finally, immediately the "need" is reduced to zero, and you are left with empty words .

Actually the NOS market works just that way.  While good NOS Philco 2A3 where available at Ebay for 30$ , everybody wanted only RCA, preferably matched pairs in sealed boxes. After NOS tubes were all gone, everybody wanted good used RCA, with 100% test values. So now you can buy good used Philco, but nobody wants them because they're not sold out (yet). That's the world of NOS, and we ran into that psychology with the 2A3 reissue ourselves.

Anyway, reservations orders of 50pcs per person were normal, and we thought we would already be happy if we sold a small part of what  people inquired for.

It kept puzzling me, how we could fix the technical problems,  and after a while I got Alesa to make a 2A3 from a 300B.  This was my idea, but we were not very satisfied with that tube. It was  no real 2A3,  it was just a 2.5 Volts 300B.  The same funny tubes as Fullmusic still makes them today. We made the change from a 300B into a semi 2A3  by rearranging  the electrical connections of the filaments.  For a 2A3 we put them all in parallel, which is actually a bad thing to do,  but at least we had something to begin with.  From here it all started.  Then we changed something to get the Gm up, and another  thing to move the  Rp where we wanted it,  use real 2.5 Volt filaments, etc.  But  it was very frustrating, because when we changed one parameter, some other would  change along with it,  and we never got them all together right. That kept Alesa busy.   But  we were heading in the right direction, and we knew we had something here that might  work.

And then  (typical for Alesa)  after the summer holiday from 1999 he just came unexpected to me and said:  Jac,  look here, this is what you want, here is a  real 2A3.   I put it on my tube tester, and all parameters were right!  He made it all alone, while the factory was closed, and all workers were in holiday. He had a room for technical projects, that his workers respectfully called the Edison room.  The tube tested as a correct, good and wonderful 2A3.  Our reference was a Chinese double plate 2A3, that we again and again compared the prototypes tube with.  Note that at that time the Chinese 2A3 was the only 2A3 from new production available at that time. So again, to compare our 2A3 with,  there was no JJ 2A3 (yet) , and no Sovtek 2A3 (yet),  and no Fullmusic 2A3 (yet) or whatever 2A3.  There was NO new production 2A3 on the market,  only the SHUGUANG 2A3 from China. So without being arrogant,  please consider me as the person who initiated to rebuild   the FIRST SINGLE PLATE 2A3 ever again since (let me guess....) 1950.   Making the mesh tube is partially my idea, together with two guys from New York.  More about that later....

The tube you see here,  I still have. This is a museum piece.  You are looking at the FIRST SINGLE PLATE 2A3,  ever made again since 1950. Here you see the picture of the FIRST solid plate 2A3 tube. It carries the Series number 1196S,  and was made on July 1999.   Nobody had that tube, apart from us!    It still had white plates,  that we made heat resistant with a special ultra-fine nickel powder that Alesa digged up from some closed down tube Tesla facility. This nickel powder was unavailable already at that time, and was NOS material to say.  So we could not make series production with it. Supply would last for a few hundred tubes only.  So we made it with black plates, that are more heat resistant. With black plates we could take the coolers off which made it look more like the vintage single plates too. Of course now that today this tube is so successful,  all competitors claim this tube as their baby, but it was AVVT. Today you can buy them from Kron, and from Shuguang , and from JJ, and from Electro-Harmonix, and from Sovtek,  and I don't know if I forgot some,  who also had this idea to rebuild 2A3, AFTER we had the idea.

2nd Project 2A3 MESH PLATE I would like to give a lot of credit to Dave Slagle here,  and Steve Berger,  two tube experts  from the New York scene.   I was in contact with them about repairing three type 50 MESH  tubes from RCA.  Datecodes were estimated 1928.  As many people think you can just re-vacuum old tubes,  this was the idea here as well. Alesa  said this was very expensive to repair,  and the whole tube need to be taken apart. Well, when Alesa says it's difficult, that's what it is! We thought it was better not to risk those pieces of history and not repair them to death. So we decided to leave them as is.  It did spark the initial idea to build a 2A3 mesh tube though. I managed to find good and clean mesh material from a company in Germany. The wire was thinner than we wanted, but it could be used. They send me a sample, and just a few weeks later Alesa came to me with his as usual was of saying "Jac,  I have something here for you that you will like"  He made just one 2A3 mesh out of a  tiny sample piece of mesh material I got! The tube worked perfect right out of the box.   That was in October 1999.  All parameters OK, and it could do 18 Watt. This one I still have, and it still works fine.   It has the number 1811S. It is the FIRST MESH 2A3 tube,  ever made again since (who knows...?) 1938. Interesting is the first tube, worked good right away.  It is the one you see pictured  here.   Due to weather circumstances mesh tubes could only be made at that time when the weather was very dry. So we had to wait until next spring for series production.  We ordered another sample of the mesh from which we made some 30 tubes.  These were sold, and all buyers were enthusiastic.

Another tube we reintroduced as the first company was the famous 274A rectifier tube, back in the year 2000.  I noticed Shuguang has picked up  this idea in 2004, and Fullmusic made a good 274A in 2002 already.  Also Western Electric is announcing it since a few years now.   But.... we just want to point out here who has this idea first. We didn't#t make too many of them.  The good ones were all sold.   I have some non-working prototypes that I will picture later.

4th Project
300B Mesh

It gets a bit boring.... but no no....  it was not Fullmusic who invented the 300B mesh. It was AVVT who invented it.  We were the first with a 300B Mesh.  This was all Alesa's idea.  Unfortunally he found NO WAY to make the mesh black, which is what you need to get close to 40 Watt. He did have a secret way to make the mesh gray, but this was as far as he got.  Together with coolers,  he could make it up to 22 Watt, and later versions around 30 Watt, but that was it.   These tubes were very reliable.