Just rescued a quad of Sylviania STR-387s!!!!

[SonicProvocateur]

My bassist had an old Peavey Classic tube amp he brought to practice today to let me scavenge for tubes (he said it had Ruby's in it, and my Ruby's were dying and sounding fuzzy and like crap) and LO-AND-BEHOLD, a quad of Peavey labeled, dual halo-getter STR-387 (aka 415s!)

Sweet lord, the tone!, I'm in love with my Mark again.

Talk about HEADROOM!, I was blasting these Sylvania's giving them all they've got and they weren't even breaking a sweat! The cleans are immaculate, the guitars tonewood and pickups shine through. Articulation is tight and wonderful. I'm back to my old blue-stripe-verge-of-IIC+ tone again. God bless you USA tubes!

(oh, and I also found 2 really old Mesa SP12AX7s, and a Mesa STR12AT7 to boot! What a lucky day - best thing, he traded them to me for my Crate V18!)

 

[cremona]

My bassist had an old Peavey Classic tube amp he brought to practice today to let me scavenge for tubes (he said it had Ruby's in it, and my Ruby's were dying and sounding fuzzy and like crap) and LO-AND-BEHOLD, a quad of Peavey labeled, dual halo-getter STR-387 (aka 415s!)

Sweet lord, the tone!, I'm in love with my Mark again.

Talk about HEADROOM!, I was blasting these Sylvania's giving them all they've got and they weren't even breaking a sweat! The cleans are immaculate, the guitars tonewood and pickups shine through. Articulation is tight and wonderful. I'm back to my old blue-stripe-verge-of-IIC+ tone again. God bless you USA tubes!

(oh, and I also found 2 really old Mesa SP12AX7s, and a Mesa STR12AT7 to boot! What a lucky day - best thing, he traded them to me for my Crate V18!)

Good find :wink:

My c+ came with peavey 415 strs (sylvanias) the seller stated the where very old and neede to be replaced, but the amp still kicked ***, but since i dident have a tube tester , i whent out and bourght 4 brand new mesa blue labled 415`s , and words cant decribe have awsome ,dynamic and thight the amp now sounds, the peaveys where diffently starting to give up, talk about amazing chunk tone , the amps sounds like angry top fuel V8, and that is beautiful and scary.

Il state this , if you havent heard a c+ with well functioning 415 STR´s you have no clue what it can do.

I imagin its the same with the mark III ,God bless sylvania dual getter 6l6 and 6ca7`s

 

[SonicProvocateur]

These are very low hours. He got the amp from the previous owner who only put low hours on it, and when he got the amp it kept blowing fuses so he got it repaired and the repair guy tried to tell him to retube it (to get the tubes obviously!) and since it got repaired it's only seen about 5 hours of use. These old Sylvania's probably only have 20-40 hours of burn on em! I'm going to let my buddy test them though just to see what the draw is though, that way I don't cook them too hard and I can match the pairs. I also wanna check these SP12AX7s.

Anyone know what brands the older SP12AX7s are? I haven't plugged them in to find out how they sound...they still have the rubber heatshrink on them. They look like 1980's issues. Definitely not the newer ones.

 

[JOEY B.]

Sweet lord, the tone!, I'm in love with my Mark again.

Talk about HEADROOM!, I was blasting these Sylvania's giving them all they've got and they weren't even breaking a sweat! The cleans are immaculate, the guitars tonewood and pickups shine through. Articulation is tight and wonderful. God bless you USA tubes!

Great score! The only problem now is that you have tasted the honey. :wink: From that day forward, you will never look at Chinese or Russian 6L6's the same way again. The SED =C= are the only ones that even come close, tone wise. Then, the durability of the USA tubes gets my vote, every time. 8)

 

[SonicProvocateur]

Just did a quick Youtube video to show off the tone a little bit...it was clipping some (of course, all my video suck lol)

But man, you can still hear it growl like crazy...plus i've learned to use annotations a little better!!

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Mz012GVIcik