The AM Forum

Here is a little flashback to the end of the TV tube era.

Mike WU2D

Egads, list prices were high.

I don't suppose many of us ever paid that rate, maybe at a drug store when you really needed that 5Y3.

I do remember thinking I was getting the shaft at Dalis Electronics in Phoenix. 

It was 1983, and I had to pay some $35 each for a pair of WECo 300B's....

73DG

Those are Mfr's list. Means nothing at the over the counter sale. Dealers buy from manufacturer at 40 to 50 per cent off list. Gives them a slop margin for discounts. Common ploy was to post mfr's list and then "our price".

Those prices seem really high.  Back in the late 60's early 70's I don't remember any tube costing more than a few bucks from the dealer.  Nearly every tube on the 82 list has a double digit list price.

The fictitious "list" price was always about double the actual retail price. And there were always "wholesalers" that sold them for much less than that.

What it generally means is, if a manufacturer was going to sell these tubes to directly to consumers, they would be offered at "list price". The dealer generally gets the tubes at 40, 50, or even 60 per cent off the list price, depending on their quantities (higher quantities means bigger discounts). So, the dealer can mark them up 20 to 40 percent, still make a profit, and looks better in the eyes of the consumer then the manufacturer's prices. A smart manufacturer never wants to price undercut their dealers. And a real smart manufacturer, if they have a widely sell-able product, should never sell directly to consumers, but just through dealers.

I remember as a kid, before I started buying all my stuff by mail order from Allied Radio, Burstein Applebee and LaFayette, going to the local radio repair shop and asking about the prices of tubes. The owner handed me a manufacturer's catalogue and told me "50% list price".

Customers would pull the tubes from their radio or TV, take them to the drug-store tube checker, and then come to him to purchase replacements for the bad ones.  The tubes must have cost him substantially less than 50% for him to be willing to sell them at that price, especially since they avoided his service charge for troubleshooting. I seem to recall that 50% list was about what the mail-order vendors charged, too.

With out-of-state mail orders you save what you would pay for sales tax, but pay shipping charges.  Usually they pretty much even out.

In looking at some 60's data, Lafayette (it's not LaFayette) generally was getting about 70% to about 75% off mfr's list price. But then again, they bought thousands and thousands of tubes each month. I would suspect Allied Radio and Burstein Applebee also got similar deals. There was probably a minimum purchase requirement from the manufacturer. Small shops could also go to tube wholesalers.

Interesting that the 6E5 and Nuvistor 6CW4 are at the top of the price list.

Also I see that the 6MU8 is over 20 bucks. I just bought two cartons of them NIB for $1 each. Both ABC tubes and Tubesandmore have had these on sale for that price. I use them as an upgrade for the 6U8A in my QRO Central Electronics 20A's. The beefier Pentode section allows me to turn up the wick on the 9 Mhz xtal oscillator..

Jim
WD5JKO

Tubesandmore must be running low on their stock of n.o.s. US made tubes.  Last time I ordered some receiving types from them, the ones that arrived were made in Korea. Plus, they seem to be increasingly "out of stock" in the tubes they list on their web site.

I guess the "list" price more reflects the complexities of tube size, construction materials used (exotic metals), stock no longer currently manufactured,  availability, demand, substitution ease and a whole host of other factors such as the tiny critical dimensions in a 6CW4.

- a snapshot in time,  at least on the day the list was released.  ;D

Yea I remember back in the mid 80s paying $20 each for 6L6s (guitar amp stuff). Those seem to be about right.

I miss the old Fair Radio Sales from the 70's. I loaded up on 808's for 75 cents apiece!

Look at today's prices at ABC:

http://www.abcvacuumtubes.com/dollar_days.html

Here is where I got them 6MU8's..

Jim
WD5JKO

Back when I was in school I use to work in a TV shop and spent many hours replacing Horizontal  output tubes, 6LQ6, 6JE6 and the like and remember that they sold to the customer for $26 or $27 late seventies early eighties dollars. The TV shop charged full list for parts along with labor. All those huge old RCA and Zenith sets that weighed a ton and when they were not eating horizontal output tubes they were burning up the flyback transformers. It would be like $125 to $175 replace the flyback and you had to install a new horizontal output tube when you did the flyback transformer because the failure would usually kill the old tube in the process. Most people back then when the flyback failed keep the TV on for the sound and with a shorted flyback the horizontal output tube would glow red and eventually get so hot that some would melt part of the envelope and develop a suck hole. But then manufactures started using HV triplers and flyback failures went way down, then all solid state so no more horizontal output tubes and finally TV set became so cheap no one bothered to repair them anymore. Around 1980 had a choice of opening a TV repair shop or going to work in broadcasting, decided to go the broadcasting rout and never regretted that choice.
RF

When I had my shop in the early 80s I got tubes from Elmira Electronics in NY. They sold Westinghouse-branded tubes, but a sales rep from one of our other suppliers said they were simply re-branded 'drops' from another company. They were very cheap, that much I remember. And we didn't have much call for tubes even in 1981. I can't remember a time when Nuvistors were ever considered cheap.

One interesting source of instant cash back then was any of the circuit boards from the old Motorola Quasar 'works in a drawer' TV sets. Apparently they were rebuilt and resold for substantially more than the $5 or so they paid. I figured the owners preferred the older sets to the newer Matsushita versions. Or maybe they had gold or other scrap value?