May 2026

Hear No Evil
A better perspective concerning the future of vacuum tubes.
Editorial By J. Martins

  I was asked recently about the AXPONA and High End Vienna shows by someone who sees the audio industry purely from a business and investment perspective and never attended a "high-fidelity" show in his life. I described the profile of companies exhibiting, the number of manufacturers and brands, and the range of prices involved currently in "high-end audio" products. When I mentioned that the majority were manufacturers from the U.S., Canada, or Europe, he reacted with the greatest of surprise and his immediate question was "and are they doing alright?".

This is a common reaction I get even from technology professionals that are not at all familiar with the world of home audio, even though many admit to being aware of some luxury audio brands when I mention them.

In this specific conversation, when I described the business environment in that market segment—generously including a broader spectrum of brand examples with varying prices—the next question I got was something on the lines of "...and will they still be around much longer?"

I understand it. The idea that there are companies in Oregon, Texas, France, Germany, Poland, or Switzerland building handcrafted wood cabinets and circuit boards, employing between 10 and 100 people—some employing half the population of a small village, as we see in Europe—seems out of a fiction novel.

For someone who is used to dealing with broad "technology" sectors and very high volume production companies largely based in China, it's difficult to accept the notion that audio companies can exist at that "small" scale.

He was somewhat amused with my description about how many of the rooms in these audio shows still play vinyl and how robust the business of manufacturing high-end turntables, tonearms, and cartridges still is today. But when I happened to mention the term "tubes," there was a silence, and I felt I had lost him. How can I explain "that" to someone who is completely unenlightened about the euphonic wonders of glass audio? More importantly, how can I even make the case of a technology that largely depends on "new-old-stock" components?

For this issue, I had planned to explore the few examples of new tubes that have appeared recently on the market, including some esoteric references from Japan and China, only to face a complete lack of response to our messages. While some new "branded" tubes have appeared on the market, those brands only exist to disguise the true origin of the actual products, including references from Shuguang of China, and others that cannot be labeled "Made in Russia." The noble exception is Western Electric and its formidable effort to bring back tube manufacturing to the US with the modern Rossville Works factory in Georgia.

Most audio enthusiasts are willing to look away as to the origin of tubes, but it certainly doesn't help for a business to thrive when its supply chain is conditioned to a "three wise monkeys" behavior. It certainly didn't inspire me to try to make the case for audio electronics based on tubes to someone interested in a purely economic perspective of the hi-fi industry.

The audio industry remains strongly attached to foundational values that have been cultivated over the past six or seven decades since "high-fidelity" gained meaning in the homes of consumers. As Richard Honeycutt addresses in his fascinating Hollow-State article in this issue, evoking Hermon Hosmer Scott (H.H. Scott) and indirectly Avery Fisher, those incredible success stories are also great illustrations of the heritage of a large industrial US ecosystem that was quickly being phased out.

In Dan Fraser's article in this issue, we are reminded of the work of David Hafler, Herbert Keroes, Ed Laurent, Hafler's partner in The Dyna Company and Dynaco's chief engineer who designed the first Mk.II power amps, or Bob Tucker, who helped design the original ST-70 amplifier in 1959. Dan Fraser already references the challenges of modern production of a tube-based design that complies with today's regularity requirements and relies on a sustainable supply chain.

I would like to have a better perspective about the future of tubes to discuss a year from now in our next issue of Glass Audio. There are certainly many great uses for tubes in audio designs today, but it would be even better if those components weren't restricted to the NOS category, or worse, "unobtanium" parts.

J. Martins
Editor-in-Chief

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