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10-29-2026, 12:07 PM
Hi Martin
Most cities have extensive recycling programs and you may have to visit the landfill to be able to deposit these items in the electronics recycling area. Street pickup is primarily for plastics and everything that can be shredded (cardboard, etc).
Regarding tube life: If you have read any of the TUTs (The Ultimate Tone book series), or my other comments here or on other forums, you know that the true life time for a vacuum tube is generations in length. Your great grand children will be able to enjoy the tubes you install today into an amp you built or refurbished. Even their great grand children can enjoy them.
Unless a tube is mechanically abused, its electrical life is many decades long. Disreputable tube manufacturers and resellers will tell end users that the tube life is six months or so. They just want you to keep buying tubes.
The infant sound of every tube is a bit harsh and bright. After about 100-hours of use the sound mellows and the noise reduces. The tube is now on its Tone Plateau and will sound the same for decades. Some amp manufacturers like Mesa depend on that infant tone for their overall sound, and players of such amps follow suit, replacing perfectly good tubes with new ones to be able to maintain the brittleness of "everything new". Of course, just by coincidence, Mesa sells tubes.
For the player or tube hifi enthusiast, that 100-hours may be six months of use of the equipment. The initial tone change is fairly fast and readily apparent. Once on the Tone Plateau, gain is still being lost but now at an infinitesimal rate that you won't notice over a decade or few. What you may notice are the effects of capacitor aging over time, but rarely if ever tube aging.
Manufacturers consider the tube's useful life to end when cathode emission drops to half. This takes many decades and even then the tube has a long way to go before it is truly dead.
So, there are different definitions of "outlived their usefulness". Some are costly to both the player and the environment.
Most cities have extensive recycling programs and you may have to visit the landfill to be able to deposit these items in the electronics recycling area. Street pickup is primarily for plastics and everything that can be shredded (cardboard, etc).
Regarding tube life: If you have read any of the TUTs (The Ultimate Tone book series), or my other comments here or on other forums, you know that the true life time for a vacuum tube is generations in length. Your great grand children will be able to enjoy the tubes you install today into an amp you built or refurbished. Even their great grand children can enjoy them.
Unless a tube is mechanically abused, its electrical life is many decades long. Disreputable tube manufacturers and resellers will tell end users that the tube life is six months or so. They just want you to keep buying tubes.
The infant sound of every tube is a bit harsh and bright. After about 100-hours of use the sound mellows and the noise reduces. The tube is now on its Tone Plateau and will sound the same for decades. Some amp manufacturers like Mesa depend on that infant tone for their overall sound, and players of such amps follow suit, replacing perfectly good tubes with new ones to be able to maintain the brittleness of "everything new". Of course, just by coincidence, Mesa sells tubes.
For the player or tube hifi enthusiast, that 100-hours may be six months of use of the equipment. The initial tone change is fairly fast and readily apparent. Once on the Tone Plateau, gain is still being lost but now at an infinitesimal rate that you won't notice over a decade or few. What you may notice are the effects of capacitor aging over time, but rarely if ever tube aging.
Manufacturers consider the tube's useful life to end when cathode emission drops to half. This takes many decades and even then the tube has a long way to go before it is truly dead.
So, there are different definitions of "outlived their usefulness". Some are costly to both the player and the environment.
