The Hidden Cost of Tube Amps

Tube amps are beautiful to look at. When I first purchased the Galion TS120, I marveled at how beautiful it looked at night when I dimmed the lights in our listening room. It was exactly what I expected vacuum tubes to look like – a steam-punk aesthetic that brings one back to the earlier days of hi-fi audio equipment. I have an old AM radio driven by tubes, but they are hidden inside the chassis. Part of the experience of owning a tube amp is the visual aspect. What can I say – I have an old soul. I’ve even produced audio drama shows and podcasts because of my love of those old radio shows like The Shadow and Inner Sanctum.  

The allure of an all-tube solution for my audio setup was something that I knew I would one day succumb to. 

I don’t want any of this to sound as if I’m anti solid-state or that I feel it’s inferior in any way. Quite the opposite, in fact. Before the Galion, my primary listening amplifier was the Denon 600NE. I loved that amp and still do. The Galion might have replaced it as my main amp, but the Denon is still hooked up in my office, where I clean and test records. That’s where my Klipsch 600 MIIs are after I replaced them with the KLH Model 5s. The stuff I love has a second life up there. 

Hidden costs.  

It’s no secret that quality tube amps aren’t cheap. For a good one, you can plan on spending over $1000 – often two to four times that, and even more in some cases. Tube amps also run hot. My Galion TS120 throws off at least 50 degrees, which you can feel when you stand a foot away from it. It should help with the heating bill. That heat is a double-edged sword – because they run hot and take time to warm up, there is a hit to the electric bill. It’s not a big hit and probably only amounts to a buck or two a month if you use it daily like I do. Everything else being equal, it’s still something to be aware of.

Heat is not necessarily a good thing when it comes to electronic equipment. It will, over time, stress the other components, and this could lead to a higher chance of failure or degradation. Finding someone to repair them might be tricky because tube amps are a high-end specialty item. If it’s a US-based manufacturer, they may offer repairs. Mine Galion TS-12o weighs about 70 lbs. I can only imagine what the shipping costs would be were I to send it somewhere. 

And then there are the tubes. Stock tubes aren’t too expensive to replace, but you should be aware that they will need to be replaced someday. Depending on the tubes and the unit, this could be between 1,000-10,000 hours. One of the draws to tube amplification is tweaking the sound by switching different tubes out with other brands of different sonic qualities. This is called tube rolling. That can get expensive. I’ve tweaked the sound on the Galion by replacing the preamp tubes with NOS (New Old Stock) Telefunken tubes I’d purchased from Brent Jessee Recording a few weeks before for a couple hundred bucks. I KT88s replaced the KT88s with a set of matched new production Mullard tubes. Again – it’s not exactly cheap.

These are all things to be aware of if you’re considering taking the plunge into the wonderful world of tube amplifiers – and it is a wonderful world.