That sounds really interesting I must say.
But if I´m reading you correctly there are two brands basically competing over the same brand, NOS Telefunken from the US and the JJ branden Telefunkens....right?
Damn, searching for new tubes is a real jungle...I always get more or less lost
No, the NOS Telefunkens were made in Germany until production ceased, probably before 1980. The new JJ-made ones are imported by an American company that bought the rights to use the name Telefunken.
NOS means "new, old stock," in other words, new tubes that are unused and still around from the old days when they were still being made in Europe, the USA, etc. The great ones are very rare and expensive. I just recently shelled out several hundred bucks for one late 60s NOS Mullard 12AX7 with the correct British manufacturing date codes, for example, and similar amounts for some NOS BRIMARs, another British tube from the same era.
NOS tubes last for decades as long as the seals remain intact, although the BRIMARs are a little less consistent than the Mullards, and they're a bit cheaper.
The JJ-made Telefunkens are simply re-branded JJs, just hand-picked and cryo-treated. The US company using the name had absolutely nothing to do with Telefunken, which was the German national radio company.
Original Telefunken-brand microphones were actually made by Neumann and AKG for radio use, by the way. The old ones are highly sought after and can go for five figures if in good shape. The new Telefunken brand mics are copies of the old ones, and are actually fantastic microphones, but they're also very expensive! The top models go for 6-7 grand. But back to tubes...
Today's Tung-Sols, Mullards and a few other "old names" are simply re-branded Russian tubes, to give the buyer the idea that they're getting something as good as the old stuff. If it doesn't say NOS on a tube site, you're getting new tubes. If it says "Made in Russia" on the box, you're not getting NOS tubes. The originals were made in the US (Tung-Sol), Britain (Mullard, BRIMAR and some Philips because by the 50s Philips had bought Mullard), Germany (Telefunken and Siemens), or Holland (Philips or Bugle Boy). By the 70s, some US-branded tubes were also being made by Philips, BRIMAR and Mullard, but by that I mean the old companies, not the new names for Russian made tubes.
There's nothing terribly wrong with today's Russian tubes, by the way. And there are some decent Chinese tubes, too. But...
The new ones aren't as good as the old stuff; the tolerances on the old machines that made tubes were tighter, because the machines were 30-40 years newer; the manufacturers' employees knew more about what they were doing (don't underestimate the specialized knowledge the old guys had), etc. So the "real" NOS tubes that were used in everything from radios to TVs to medical equipment to jet aircraft, were made to very strict tolerances compared to today's tubes, where the market is basically limited to guitar amps and hi fi rigs.
The Czechs, the Russians and other Eastern Bloc countries bought the old machines from the West when tube production stopped in Western Europe and the US. That was 36 years ago. That's a long time for a manufacturing machine to operate, and of course, those machines had already been in operation for many years.
There's mythology that the Russians and Americans are still using tube technology in jet fighter aircraft because of nuclear pulses being able to take out transistors, and a long time ago that was the case, but today's fighters are so dependent on computer technology for flight control that it's no longer that way. Jets aren't running on tubes any more.
