Groove tube BS
David St Hubbins said:
This reads more like an advertisement for Groove Tubes than a non-endorsement of The Tube Store.
Exactly! When that Groove Tube guy writes an article by the time you finish reading it you think he invented the electron all by himself!
Notice how those companies he endorses are all part of a small circle that sell or provide services to each other. Nothing wrong with that! It's always more pleasant to deal with friends and people you trust. Still, you sort of sense from the tone of this article that he thinks this is the ONLY circle of "good" companies. And that of course is illogical crap!
The Groove Tube claim about manufacturing their own products is one made for years by many electronic part manufacturers. The problem is that the definition of making your own part is often more from a marketing or legal viewpoint and not what most of us would assume when we hear their sales pitch.
Consider, most of the electrolytic capacitors in the world are made by a handful of Eastern companies. The industry slang term is the "Con Brothers", since their brand names all end in "-con" as in Chemi-con, Nichi-con or whatever.
There are a number of other brand names that don't actually make their own product. What they do is to place annual orders for ZILLIONS of different caps, enough to fill their entire product line. They then rent or "timeshare" one of the Con factories for a period of time long enough to manufacture their entire order. They have the caps branded with their name and logo, perhaps with their own distinctive colour sleeve.
Because they order in such huge volumes their costs are low enough to sell competively in the mainstream marketplace Sometimes their forecasts are not loose enough to handle an unexpected run on certain specific cap values and when that happens they're beat until it's time for next year's production run!
Tubes can be sourced in the same manner. Technically, you've made your own product 'cuz the factory is "yours" under a timeshare agreement. You also can have a tube made with some custom "tweaks" to your own design and specs. You'd likely have to pay a bit more to do this so you'd have to pass that along when you resold it. and whether these mods make your tube any better than something from a direct manufacturer is a matter of opinion. As I had said, most of the claims sound more like marketing than true techie stuff!
In the industrial electronic parts world nobody really cares if it's a rebranded part, as long as it passes the customer's own quality testing department to get spec'd in. Because these parts are bought by the boxcar full anybody who sells crap is out of business because he'll never make a SECOND sale!
In the guitar amp world your customer is not likely to be very technical so you can more easily "baffle him with BS". It's worse in the audiophile "hifi" market.
Me, I believe an amp of current will shove a volt through an ohm. If you can't make your claim about a tube or an amp in those kind of terms then I tend to write you off as either a non-techie who got snowed or just another "suit" trying to pull a con.