14 DAY TRIAL // Rock tone was born some 50 years ago... as a matter of fact, I guess nobody knows what was in the beginning: the people who wanted to rock and were looking for tone or those who accidentally overdrove a tube amp and have seen/heard that "crunch sounds neat" and decided to make something useful with that sound...
Anyway, rock was born and I am happy about that! It's back then as well when one of the most serious and coveted power tube was born from the hands of Marconi-Osram Valve Company (Genalex). Back in '57, the Gold Lion KT88 was born and set a standard hard to overthrow even after all these years.
Historical amps such as Marshall Major, Dynaco Mark III, and the McIntosh MC275 got their sweet sound and major tone from the burning electrodes in the Golden Lion. Unfortunately the 80's brought with them the cease of the Genalex production and the Golden Lion KT88 became a rarissimo object, most sought-after and selling for as much as $500 a pair on the not-so-white market...
Years have passed and research is finally paying off: New Sensor Corporation have finally resurrected the long-lost Genalex Golden Lion KT88 and another history-making brand is distributing it - Glasstone Amplification.
If you think that the new King is just a cheap remake then think twice because the new powertubes are more of clones of the initial valves.
Gold plated grid wire, carbonized screen grids, and a tri-alloy clad plate structure for exceptional performance and sound quality: do these things sound to you like "cheap"?
Glasstone themselves feel like proudly speccing: "Following a 24 hour burn-in, these tubes are tested and matched for plate current as well as transconductance. The measured specs are labeled on each tube's individual box." Now, THIS is real valve-making, if you ask me!
The tubes come as matched pairs and paired fours so no mismatching is possible, whatsoever. And as I've spoken about cheap, they're not as cheap as you might have thought... not the black-market $500 but a decent roughly $130 a pair. Get them while they're hot!