Orange tube testers

[Cartman]

Have any of you used the Orange VT-1000 or MKII tube testers? Are they considered to be good units for checking the remaining life of a tube and for matching?

[Stevem]

A ton of great sounding amps do not have even 90% matched output tubes in them if there class AB.
Theses lots of reasons why that is!

[dorrisant]

Those Orange tube testers are not so great. A store I did service for thought that they'd cut out the work they'd send me by testing tubes in the store. They'd send me amps that "passed" the Orange tester. I would find bad tubes nearly every time they did that. They stopped their in-house testing after a couple of months and the owner offered me the Orange tester for a discount... I kindly declined and laughed to myself about it.

This is not the only story like this... Beware.

[Helmholtz]

I'm happy with my VT-1000.
Have been using it for more than 10 years on hundreds of tubes. Never had a problem.
Great for matching.
Only caveat:
Testing a warm tube can give a false positive result. Tube must be at room temperature. When re-testing a tube shortly after the first test, a (false) better rating will be displayed.
I think they'e evaluating emission ramp-up time.

I mainly use the tester to preselect tubes.
Final test is always in the designated amp.

[Stevem]

Yes it test the cathode emission ramp up time which is a factor in tube life, but not a good indicator of how well a tube will amplify.
With a cheap tube tester you can perform the same test by dropping the testers filiment voltage down I step lower then what the tube should be powered at.

Do yourself and your amps tone and feel a big plus and get a tester that can read out what the tubes Gm is.

[Helmholtz]

To be clear, the VT-1000 performs a 17 step test sequence. This includes Gm.
Tubes with a score of 6 or higher perform close enough for my purposes when pairing equal numbers.

I don't need another tube tester and I don't need an exact Gm number.
Gm varies with plate current, and voltage gain and plate current are always best measured in the actual amp.
As Enzo used to say: A tube tester can tell you if a tube is bad but not if it's good.

[B Ingram]

... considered to be good units for checking the remaining life of a tube ...?

No tube tester exists that can directly tell you the "remaining life of a tube."

There were testers that could indicate a tube had little remaining life left, and they did this by lowering the heater voltage. If the measurements of the tube dropped way off compared to normal-voltage, the user could infer the tube had little life left. Tubes whose readings did not drop off with reduced heater voltage were judged to "have plenty of remaining life," but it was not possible to quantify that.

If you read the old books that covered tube testing thoroughly, they generally say some not-tested-problem (noise, microphonics, arcing) are likely to make a tube unusable long before it stops "working" in the manner that Tube Testers test.

[neskor]

Recently I got the Orange VT1000 tube tester with a problem.
Tester fail every tube I tried.
I think problem is with heater circuit. It goes only to 2V and then drop to zero with fail result.
Checked all the connections, connectors, but I didn't find anything suspicious. Reflow everything, but no change.
Anyone had a problem like this?

[neskor]

quick update
issue resolved, reflow again all the connection on the main PCB, this time reflow main IC chip and fresh bath in isopropyl alcohol resolve the issue