Is This The Most Valuable Vacuum Tube Ever Made?

In the 1980s, on a farm in North Carolina, a group of teenage boys tied at least 20 old vacuum tubes to a barbed-wire fence and shot them to pieces. Every one of them was a Western Electric 300B. Today a new matched pair costs about $1,500. This is the story of the 300B: a low-power triode built in 1938 for theaters and the Bell telephone system, beaten by beam tubes before World War II and by transistors after it. It spent the 1960s inside NASA-era power supplies, got thrown out with old movie theater sound systems, and was saved by audiophiles in France and Japan who decided it was the best-sounding power tube ever made. When Western Electric stopped making it in 1988, prices took off. Then one collector licensed the Western Electric name from AT&T and spent 25 years and three factories bringing it back, ending in Rossville, Georgia. Watch the 12AX7 story, the tube Western Electric now wants to build in Georgia too: https://youtu.be/CtTuwJBRiD0 Have you ever heard a 300B amp? Is single-ended magic, or is a good push-pull amp just better? Tell me in the comments. And if I got a date, a number or a name wrong, tell me there too. I read every comment and I pin corrections. Parts That Changed History tells the stories behind the chips, machines and parts that shaped the modern world, and the people who built them. Subscribe for a new story every day. SOURCES Eric Barbour, "History of the WE300B and Its Relatives," Vacuum Tube Valley, Issue 3, Winter 1995-96 Herb Reichert, "Gramophone Dreams #48: The Venus Tube, Western Electric's 300B," Stereophile, April 2021 Herb Reichert, "Gramophone Dreams #51," Stereophile "One Man's Quest to Revive the Great American Vacuum Tube," Wired, 2023 "Western Electric to Reintroduce Famous 300B Electron Tube," audioXpress, May 2018 "The 300B Tube Lives Again!" Antique Radio Classified, January 1998 HiFi Pig, "Western Electric 300B Vacuum Tube," March 2021 Takatsuki Electric, TA-300B product information Wikipedia: 300B; Western Electric (tube manufacturer) #300B #VacuumTube #WesternElectric