Replacement EF86 - quiet / low microphonic

[DesignTaylor]

Did a little testing last night. Moved the router away and put my phone on the other side of the room. I'm not sure that it made a huge difference. I also added some isolation feet to my component stand to try and reduce vibrations (old house with bouncy floors). Again, no obvious result.

What I will say is that the longer I leave the unit on the better it performs. After about 30+ minutes you still get some warm hiss if you crank it but the pitter patter is pretty much gone.

While I'd love it to be a little quieter I'm mostly happy with how things are sounding. The Eros does seem to emphasize the noise floor of my records more than my previous phonostage but that may just be the tradeoff for the extra richness I'm now getting. Or maybe an alternative cartridge would do better.

I've got a pair of NOS Westinghouse EF86 on the way so we'll see how they do as well.

[DesignTaylor]

Further update. I have the new Westinghouse EF86 tubes loaded into the Eros. They are much, much quieter, and seem less susceptible to interference but so far sound a bit flat (megaphone tone) to my ear. They've only got 6 hours of burn-in time so we'll see how they shake out.

[2wo]

Try cleaning the tube pins on the noisy set...John

[DesignTaylor]

Haven't cleaned the contacts yet, I will give that a try. I ordered some DeoxIt... any other recommendations?

Here's a crazy question that probably warrants its own thread... does humidity impact tube performance? I've always noticed that when it gets cold out and the air gets dry (and the central heat is running more) I get a lot more static on my records and things just tend to sound noisy. Recently, I've noticed that my previously very quiet Westinghouse EF86s are way noisier since it got colder and dryer out. Is there anything to that or is it just a day to day performance difference?

[Doc B.]

Ask this after you clean the tube pins.

[DesignTaylor]

I cleaned all the contacts on my tubes tonight (the Winged “C” set and the Holland Westinghouse set) to see if that made a difference. ALso cleaned the terminals (lightly). I might have picked up a little performance on both but the stock tubes (which do sound robust) still have just as much background noise as ever.

The Westinghouse are starting to sound better to me. Maybe they are breaking in or maybe they get along better with the Nagaoka MP-110 cart I just swapped back in (with a new AT-HS10SV headshell).

Too many variables to isolate. I have some more EF86s NOS tubes on the way that I bought in a lot for fun. We'll see.

In my ongoing quest for low background noise, I had already been considering a AT VM540ML cart which I may be getting closer to pulling the trigger on. It's only money, right?

[DesignTaylor]

I picked up a few more tubes to try out. So far my favorites are the Mullards (branded Eico) mad in Great Britain. They have a lot of detail but still sport a strong sound and very low background noise. I think to summarize my experience, the right set of tubes made all the difference in terms of sound quality and noise. Very happy with the whole package right now.