What about Groove Tube

[bobtec]

I know they sold out to Feender,Where do they get there tubes from?,Do they only pick the best from a huge load and what happens to all the others they don't use

[DaveMcLain]

From my understanding you're right, Pittman sold Groove Tubes to Fender about a year ago. I've always felt that they probably over emphasized the importance of matching the output tubes on a push pull guitar amp. Sure it's nice to have them pretty close to make biasing easier and less of a compromise but that's about it in my opinion. I myself have generally had good results from their selected preamp tubes but I don't know what selection criteria they are actually selected by except for output and microphonic problems.

Groove Tubes always supposedly bought large lots of tubes, tested them and then tossed out the bad ones. I guess if you can buy them cheap enough and charge enough of a premium this business model makes sense.

Some people don't particularly care for Aspen Pittman and his business practices but one thing that's for certain is that he helped to build a lot of interest in vintage guitar amps and tube gear in particular. This was from a guitar player's point of view which is probably a good thing.