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. 

How it all began

In the 1970's After the disappearance of directly heated triodes, like 2A3, there was indeed a period of almost no production and no interest. It sounds so weird perhaps today, but indeed nobody was interested in tubes at all any more. Factories did not close production of those for nothing. It was in those days, that a young engineer, by the nama of Alesa Vaic started his studies of Vacuum Technologies at the Prague university, sponsored by his mother. It was the last year where you could study vacuum technology. In those days the Czech Republic was behind the iron curtain. There was no way in or out for civilians. Alesa however was in contact with some tube collectors from Italy, and he knew that for some tubes prices were very high. So he had the idea to jump into the replica market. I know Alesa personally very well, and he is a trial and error kind of person. Well many engineers are like that and there is nothing wrong with it, as long as you learn from your errors. So he tried to set up a production for the most sought after tubes at that moment, which sure was not the 300B. The collector's market was asking for replacements of the balloon type of tubes for 1920's radios. A whole series of Tungsten heated, no-getter tubes resulted from this. Alesa spoke some Italian, and was sometimes smuggling tubes out of the country, to Italian collectors. I think none of those tubes was a big hit on the market. It was like this, how Alesa learned 300B was a more interesting tube. I still have his old design drawings for RE604, but he went for the 300B.

Then followed production of the first replica of the 300B called VV300B, and this is how many projects started that most people now think are "normal" products, but was in fact based on the ideas of Alesa Vaic. Most of the practical background came from a man who was his mentor, during Alesa's university days, and at that time R&D manager at Tesla. It was particularly this person who opened many doors for him, and learned Alesa the art of glass blowing and materials sourcing. Without this man, Alesa would have been a nobody. I do not mention his name here, since I am in good contact with this man and his family still, whereas Alesa is not. All I can say is, Alesa learned everything from him, and in return gave him nothing. This was before my days with Alesa.

Later, when I met Alesa for the first time, he was in debt, and the small factory was short before a financial break down. He picked me up from the Prague rail way station, wearing torn jeans, the kind I use to work on my car. It was clear he was under large stress. He needed money urgently. The business situation was a divorce procedure with Audio Note,and we decided to solve this issue before any other, and make a good agreement with Audio Note. It worked out well, and a few weeks later it was on paper and signed. He left the details completely up to me, and it was a good beginning of the business relation we had.

When we joined up, I had some ideas that we realized together. Such as to rebuild a single plate 2A3. We were the first what that. Well, and with many other things too.

To make sure these unique 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 together with Alesa Vaic. Let me tell you that all those new tube projects were driven by myself. Alesa only wanted to make as much 300B as possible.

Alesa Vaic never was the kind of person who was 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 difficult with the  existing tools.  His problem was the tools he needed got lost in legal struggle with a former business partner from Italy.

Then, together with my webmaster, Mattijs de Vries, (great person, who now runs his own company now) we put a survey on the AVVT website, where people could reserve those tubes,  in case we would make them.  We were completely overwhelmed with what we got back. Everybody needed those tubes in large quantities. Reservations of 4...10pcs were normal, and several for 100 pcs and more. We were so excited! Well it didn't quit come that way, and we learned a few lessons from that.

Now look, what happened AFTER we re-build the 2A3 (as the first company!).

Lesson 1

The "fun" tubes.

You have to understand this market. Tube buyers need in huge quantities every NOS product which is not for sale. So, the harder it is to get, the harder they "need" it for highest prices. Then when you think you have a market, you are heading for a big mistake. When you come back after a while, and say: ok, folks we have build it, and it's on stock, and you can order now, the customers make a U-Turn. THIS is not what THEY wanted. Suddenly every one requires a reason why something that is now "normally available" should cost more than NOS products, whereas NOS products have proven quality, and yours have not. Now, I am not saying people are wrong with this thinking, there is a lot of common sense it it. What I am saying is, it is wrong to "think" this after you opened your mouth so loud about what your needs are. The need was just to be served a specialty at a moment where it was virtually unavailable. This was the need. So when you try to understand mass behavior, you will end up very confused, looking for intelligence but you won't find any. This issue breaks simply down to lesson 2, and that explains it a lot better.

Conclusion: Never invest in a fun project, without pre payed investments

Lesson 2

The lemming effect

It kept puzzling me, how we could fix the technical problems and build a 2A3 mono plate. After a while I got Alesa to make a 2A3 from a 300B, just to have a beginning at this point. It was  no real 2A3,  it was just a 2.5 Volts 300B, same as the Chinese make them nowadays. 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 it really 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 holidays he walked into my office, and said: Jac look here, this is what you need, 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 an original 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 mono plate on the market,  only the SHUGUANG Dual plate 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 persons from New York.  More about that later...

The Lemming effect is the most important one in Audio business, but how could we know. So we offered the 2A3 tube in the "RAT" newsgroup, which was the only internet platform for tube sales at that time. No Ebay, no nothing. We posted something like: "OK READY FOR SALE". It was done by my webmaster. Now look what happened. Suddenly everybody felt comfortable, and absolutely had no interest to buy NOW. They all needed good feedback from others first. The initial market potential shrinked to just 1 (One) percent, and basically that one percent of the customers was still interested, but for later, just not for now, and all the persons who needed 10, 20 or 100pcs suddenly wanted a test pair fist, and of course not just now, but also later. And when I say all, I mean ALL. The "need" was suddenly reduced to zero, and we were left with empty words and a batch of SINGLE PLATE 2A3 tubes that was unavailable on the market so far, and nobody wanted to buy. So again, you could NOT buy Russian 2A3, no cheap JJ copies, no Chinese nothing. Just unavailable NOS single plates, or AVVT and that was it. Yet we got stuck with those.

The situation started to change into a price discussion, without any initiative from our side. Now, I am a business man too, not just an engineer. If somebody wants to pay 700$ for something, he might as well pay 800$. As long as he WANTS it. So we never reduced the price at all. This can not be a price issue, as the so potential buyers told us. Suppose we reduce to half the price, the question is why are we more expensive than Chinese 300B. Things can not work this way.

So, we sold the great great quantity of 10 pairs, to some original buyers who kept word, and the rest we wanted to smash and kill the project. Here comes another mistake we made. .Instead of that, we gave many away to magazine writers. This was a major waist of shipment costs. Nobody, absolutely nobody did anything with them. Not even send us feedback that they did nothing with them.

Now comes the crazy part. These were marketing lessons for us, of the kind you can not learn in school. Here comes the challenge. We were supposed to prove that if a new made tube cost 5x more than NOS, it must sounds 5x better. And if not, the so called interested people make turn away.

From this we have drawn some hard conclusions, and today while AVVT is history, I still practice those lessons.

Conclusion : This market consist of followers only.

No offense meant. Actually the NOS market works just that way. And the stock market, and Ebay too. All markets that trade things that are available in limited quantities probably work that way. In the early days of Ebay, NOS Philco 2A3 where available for just 20$, I remember that , but everybody wanted only RCA, preferably matched pairs in original boxes. After RCA NOS tubes were all gone, everybody wanted good used RCA, with +105% test values or course. Today you can buy used RCA double plates, in 95% condition but who wants that? There are enough you can buy. That's the world of NOS, and we ran into that psychology with the 2A3 reissue. There is an early ancestor of 2A3 called Western Electric 205D, a nice balloon tube. Extremely dangerous to buy, they are from the 1920's, there can by anything wrong with it. It is so rare, I see "good testing" ones go for +1000$, and "appearance ok" tubes for hundreds of $. The sky is the limit for a superb NOS pair. Shall we re issue this? No thank you sir!

Well the only thing we can be proud of, we were at least the leaders with re-introducing the single plate 2A3. Business wise no good job, but technically we did it.

I am totally 100% confident, that as time passes, others will claim the first re-introduction of those great tubes for themselves. All we can only say, ask for PROOF, and you will see there is none. Best is to search via Google in the old rec.audio.tube files. In 1998...1999 that was THE tubes information platform, there was no other good one. The forum is still alive, and old files are not gone. Search for AVVT and read the Tech babble. It is very hard to write something in there without being attacked by people who seem to be there only for that reason, so I gave up on that forum.

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 bright idea to rebuild 2A3, AFTER we had the idea.

2nd Project 2A3 MESH PLATE I would like to this credit to Dave Slagle here,  and Steve Berger,  two tube experts  from the New York scene.  WIthout those two persons we would NEVER have made mesh tubes, and SO the Chinese would have had nothing to copy. I was in contact with them about repairing three type 50 MESH  tubes from RCA.  Date codes 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 make very 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 yes we were the first with a 300B Mesh.  This was all Alesa's idea.  Unfortunately he found NO WAY to make the mesh dark enough as we needed it, 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 28 Watt, but that was it.  These tubes were very reliable.