Wanted to share my experience with PSVANE here, as I have contacted a PSVANE member here inquiring about a quad set of PSVANE ACME KT88 tubes on September 30th. After a couple of days, I did receive an answer to contact her colleague through
psvaneusa@gmail.com, which I did.
I agreed to buy a matched quad set of ACME KT88 tubes, provided my full shipping details, and paid the PayPal invoice sent by the seller.
The tubes were sent by DHL Express and arrived safely about two weeks after I started the conversation with them.
Upon inserting them in my integrated amplifier, after the initialization procedure, the amplifier went immediately into protection mode, as apparently one set of tubes was indicated as faulty (my amp will not allow me to set any bias if the tubes are faulty and has a protection circuit that will be triggered).
Long story short, I contacted the seller and we went on a week-long back and forth saga, with the seller asking me to check the bias (which cannot even be accessed if a grid tube is faulty), send a video of the issue (which I promptly did), and then letting me know that they would get back to me with a resolution.
This never happened proactively, so I had to chase the seller multiple times for an update, which only happened today, after multiple attempts from my side to get this sorted by getting the faulty pair of tubes replaced (even though I paid for a matched quad set, but that is a different topic).
To my surprise, the seller asked me to "break the tubes" and send him a confirmation picture of it...which, as you can imagine, caused a bit of surprise from my side, as this is not something that a buyer is expected to do. But I sent the tubes back for them to check them and eventually send me a replacement.
From here on, the seller (who signs as Joe), the tone of the conversation has abruptly changed after I mentioned to Joe that I am reluctant to do this due to safety concerns first, as well as this sounding a bit shady... His replies ranged from "You have to do that if you want replacement! That’s our policy for replacement!" to "We will not pay for the return!" to "We are a factory not sellers! We promise to send you a replacement. If not, do you want to do!".
I was a bit puzzled at first, as I was not expecting this approach and these replies, but upon more careful checking of some other internet threads on this, I found that this was not an exception, with multiple other buyers reporting the same quality issues and abrupt conversations with PSVANE. Quality concerns over these tubes are commonly shared on various forum threads or European sellers' websites, so it seems the products are more of a hit and miss.
Currently, I have a case opened with PayPal, but I would definitely exercise more caution moving forward with any "direct factory" purchases from overseas manufacturers - lesson learn the hard way, I guess!
