Calling DSL401 owners

Voxman

ICBM said:

Voxman said:

Interesting, didn't know about the power differential - thanks for that ICBM .  

However, your reply suggests that 2 x EL34 design would be more expensive than 4 x EL84s which I couldn't see Marshall doing - they'd want to cut their costs.  I just checked the prices of EL34 and EL84 valves, and they seem to be about the same (e.g. JJ EL84 £11,JJ EL34 £13.50).  Clearly 2 valves are cheaper than 4 so it would make sense that Marshall uses 2 EL34's in the DSL40C to reduce its build costs.   

I'm pretty sure that at factory prices EL34s are a lot more expensive than EL84s. Certainly historically it was always so, hence the rarity of lower-powered 2-EL34 designs than about 50W, since it was cheaper to do that with four EL84s.

In fact, the way Marshall have cut costs is to move the production from the UK to Vietnam. More interestingly, the quality seems to have improved...

I think prices on EL84 & EL34 must have levelled out a bit.  EL34's are a little more expensive but nowhere near double the price.  I looked on the Karltone site (the suppliers you recommended to me) and for example a matched pair of JJ EL84's is £21, a matched pair of JJ EL34's is £26.  For Electroharmonix, these prices are £22.00 and £26.50, and Tungsol £25.80 and £35 respectively.  So on average EL34's are only around 25% more than EL84's.  

ICBM

Voxman said:

I think prices on EL84 & EL34 must have levelled out a bit.  EL34's are a little more expensive but nowhere near double the price.  I looked on the Karltone site (the suppliers you recommended to me) and for example a matched pair of JJ EL84's is £21, a matched pair of JJ EL34's is £26.  For Electroharmonix, these prices are £22.00 and £26.50, and Tungsol £25.80 and £35 respectively.  So on average EL34's are only around 25% more than EL84's.  

Remember that's retail prices for tested valves - a lot of the cost you see is in the testing, labelling, postage etc which is the same regardless of valve type, so it will even out the price difference a lot. To take an extreme (deliberately unrealistic for illustration!) case, if all that lot costs £20 per pair, then a pair of EL34s could be between three and six times more expensive than a pair of EL84s.

The actual figure will be somewhere in between, but the prevalence of 4-EL84 amps where you would normally expect to find 2-EL34 or 2-6L6 on the basis of power output does tend to show that there's a cost advantage.