[Jeffhs]

Tube testers probably will make a comeback, if they haven't already. There are brand-new tube-type high-power home-theater amplifiers being offered for sale these days, and for good reason. Any real audio purist will tell you the only way to get real high fidelity sound from an audio system is by using tubes in the output stages. Solid-state amplifiers, even those with high-power output transistors, cannot hope to match the warm sound of audio processed using vacuum tubes. (Those of you who have old radios such as high-end Zeniths, et al. with push-pull or other types of hi-fi audio stages will know what I mean.) When those tubes short or become weak, there will have to be some way to test them (short of physically replacing the defective tube with a new one).

This is where tube testers come in. Until or unless high-power home-theater audio systems are again designed with transistors some years from now (however, I don't see that happening any time soon, if at all, for reasons I mentioned above), we will be seeing quite a few HT audio amps with vacuum-tube output stages. The tube tester used to ascertain the condition (cathode emission, etc.) of these tubes need not be anything fancy such as a mutual-conductance (Gm) tester or an in-circuit one like the old Hickoks, etc. I would think any type of emission tester would do just fine to test the bottles in these new home-theater amps, as long as the tubes are not so new as not to be listed on a recent ('60s-'80s) tube chart.