After a chance encounter with retired AT&T employees during a visit to Bell Labs, Whitener traveled the Northeast in search of veterans of the legendary facility, Sylvania and RCA, who knew the mysteries of the tube manufacturing. When his factory began producing 300Bs in 1996, almost all of his 20 or so employees were tube-making veterans.
Western Electric was up and running again, but in 2003 AT&T sold the building. Whitener moved the company to Huntsville, Alabama, a NASA stronghold with skilled workers, which was convenient for his tube contracts with the Department of Defense. In 2008, he moved the business to Rossville, Georgia. It was there that he began modernizing vacuum tube designs that were more than 70 years old.
Whitener’s team developed a way to apply an atom-thick layer of graphene to the anode of a vacuum tube to extend its life by improving heat dissipation and reducing contaminating gases. These improved tubes came to market in 2020. Quality control, Whitener’s former domain, has become more automated and he says more than 90% of tubes now pass offline inspection.
Western Electric sells pairs of 300Bs in a cherry wood presentation box with a certificate describing their performance characteristics and a generous five-year warranty – yours for $1,500. The Copycat 300B sets, offered at the same price, are sold with a 30-day warranty. Most tubes have a warranty of only 90 days.
Whitener spent more than a decade preparing Western Electric’s next act. In 2006, he won an auction for the machines and tools needed to manufacture 12AX7 tubes; the pieces had started life in Blackburn, England, but were then in Serbia. It took five years of legal battles with a competing bidder before the intervention of then-Tennessee Sen. Bob Corker and the U.S. Embassy, according to Whitener, handed him possession. (Corker, contacted through a staffer, did not dispute Whitener’s characterization.)
Today, this equipment is installed in the Whitener factory, along with additional machines shipped from Slovakia in 2007. New machines that will automate processes such as the manual bending of wires needed to make 12AX7 tubes are installed. Meanwhile, Western Electric continues to produce 300Bs. Depending on the day of the week, the space might rattle to the sound of a lathe wrapping molybdenum wire around the side rods, or to the erratic hiss of gas flames heating and sealing the glass bulbs.
Very pleasant distortion
The promise of better sound is, like most things among hi-fi fanatics, subject to vicious debate. Some hear large differences between tube brands, or even individual tubes of the same brand and model. Others will tell you that each tube is indistinguishable from the next. Most agree that tubes in general have a sound that transistors, circuit boards, and algorithms can only approximate, often described as warm, rich, or even romantic.
“The tubes distort things in a very nice way,” said Daniel Schlett, an audio engineer whose Brooklyn studio, Strange Weather, is known for the analog punch it gets from mics, amps, consoles and EQs. powered by lamps. Artists who have pursued Schlett’s signature sound are as diverse as Ghostface Killah, Booker T. (of MG fame), and The War on Drugs. “The tubes are part of the equation,” says Schlett. “It’s big and amplified, and it has voodoo on it.”
