EDISWAN made in England.

NOS Loctal, TEFLON Socket. Silver plated contacts. Made by Ediswan, England. Originally packed in pair boxes, or single in sealed military boxes. Pricing is for one single socket.

Dimensions drawing

Together with the adjustable (!) socket dampers, this results in a very nice combination. The sockets contacts are silver plated. The solder contacts are tin plated.

Picture2 - Picture3

Loctal TEFLON socket NOS. Order Number: 398-803-99

We designed this air ventilation plate specifically for the Ediswan sockets. Beneath the black paint, there’s a copper screen electrically connected to the tube base and mounting screws. While optional, we strongly recommend connecting a wire from the center pin to the tube socket screw for optimal shielding. This setup, combined with the metal base of LOCTAL tubes, provides excellent protection against stray hum—something you can't achieve with Octal sockets!

With steel tubes, the whole tube outside case becomes connected to this, which works even better. This center pin has an electrical connection at the loctal socket!

EE80-27mm base plate. Order nr: 321-027-17

Dimensions and material:

• Black plate outside: 59 x 59mm
• Mounting holes, center distance 48mm.
• Mounting holes of socket, center distance 38mm
• Glass fiber Epoxy, black painted
• All round holes have gold plated sides.
• Two optional LEDs mounted. If you don't want these, they can easily be removed, and their holes look like normal ventilation holes.

Link to EE80 ventilation adapter

WARNING: Chinese sockets often damage the LOCTAL tubes. The center contact of those is so stiff and terrible, you have to force the tube in, with violence.

The problem is that you can’t feel what you’re doing, especially when removing the tube. You can’t pull it straight out—you have to wiggle it too much. While the center pin can handle this, the tube pins can’t. They pass directly through the glass with no protection against sideways force. Even a slight bend can cause a micro-crack, which might slowly leak vacuum over time, sometimes only showing up weeks or months later.

Ediswan sockets avoid this issue. You can pull the tube out vertically without wiggling, and even if you do, their contacts allow some movement in all directions—vertical, rotational, and lateral—so no stress is transferred to the glass.

Chinese Loctal sockets, however, hold the pins too tightly. When you wiggle the tube to remove it, you bend the pins each time. After several movements, those small bends can cause cracks. And with glass, there’s no such thing as a harmless crack.

The reason you can’t get the tube out of Chinese LOCTAL sockets: The center contact is poorly designed. To save costs, it lacks an external spring and is made from non-spring material. This makes the contact far too tight, and getting the tube in often requires excessive force.

When inserting a tube into a Chinese LOCTAL socket, the ceramic hole is too large, and the pin contacts are too small. Sometimes the tube pin can slip between the contact and the ceramic, which you won’t feel or see because of the force needed to insert the tube. The electrical contact may still work, but the pin and socket contacts get deformed. Over time, this damage builds up. The next time you insert a tube, the damaged socket causes the pin to bend, but it may not be recognized as a socket issue. The pin might be straightened and work for a while, but the problem will occur again, eventually leading to the pin becoming trapped and requiring a screwdriver to remove the tube. By then, the glass may have already cracked.

This wiggling will only SHIFT the pins in the USA and European sockets (see the drawing). I never thought this was important, until we sold many Loctal tubes like C3g and C3m. Specially with the Telefunken C3g-S which cost more than 250 Euro for one, this is not worth it to save on the sockets, and risk the tube.

Most other Chinese sockets are fine, but not the Chines octal (and also not the Chinese new made Au-8, see next socket).

NOS, 8Pin. Order Number 399-093-778

8-Pin Au Socket for AD1, AZ1, AZ4, etc.
Bakelite socket, black material. We purchased this NOS lot of approximately 800 pieces in 1985, long before Chinese production began.

WARNING: Be cautious of the attractive gold-plated Chinese sockets on Ebay. While they may look nicer than NOS, their dimensions have too much variation. The contacts are not made from beryllium spring bronze, which causes them to deform over time. As the contacts loosen, they can even fall inside the socket. A loose grid contact can ruin a tube, and a loose plate contact can damage the output transformer at the DC current interruption.

Forget about the "gold"—it's fake anyway—better stick with genuine NOS sockets, like the ones we offer here.