HIFISTATEMENT | netmagazine - Portrait of the ELROG Elektronenröhren GmbH and an interview with Dr. Klaus Schaffernicht

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Portrait of the ELROG Elektronenröhren GmbH and an interview with Dr. Klaus Schaffernicht

20.01.2014 // Jürgen Saile

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Two years ago some early samples haves been made. These were prototypes for debugging purposes, never meant to be sold to end customers. Some of these prototypes leaked onto the market and are still offered occasionally. They are easily identified by their slimmer glass. Their glass tubes had about the same diameter as the base. In the meantime several changes have been applied and the types ELROG ER211 and ER845 have reached maturity for series production. For me it is interesting that this manufacturer is not widely known in Germany yet, while the tubes are used more and more by asians. What does this tell us?

Silbatone of Korea, manufacturer of very upmarket audio equipment only uses the finest parts. In the meantime also ELROG 845. Source: Silbatone

Besides the standard version, the tubes can now also be ordered with a silver wired connection inside the base. For now only the ER211 is available with this feature. The Elrog tubes can be sourced through Thomas Mayer. He is reachable by email: thomas@vinylsavor.de.

Here you can also get further information about the tubes. The price is 1200 Euros for a matched pair ER211 and 1300 for a of pair ER845. Nothing for cheapskates. Or are they? Elrog products are known for the long life time. And aficionados would be glad to find a pair NOS 845 at this price.

For me it is always most interesting to get to know the person behind a product. But unfortunately Elrog resides pretty much at the other end of Germany. Therefor the following interview was done by phone. I hope to have a personal meeting during the High End fair in Munich.

Dr. Schaffernicht was a nice interview partner who was sharing all the interesting information about his company.

Interview with Dr. Klaus Schaffernicht

Jürgen Saile: How did the company ELROG start?
Dr. Klaus Schaffernicht: I worked at Telefunken for 18 years. 1980 I quit my employment and got an offer to manage a factory for night vision devices. But I always wanted to run my own business and founded ELROG a few years later in 1986 in Lüneburg. The Bavarians didn't want to have a company that made such strange things like tubes which led me to settle in the North of Germany.

JS: What did you produce back then?
Dr. KS: At the beginning I wanted to continue making my specialities for printing machinery. But then the laser arrived and tubes were not needed any more. So I teamed up with the company Hameg and started making cathode ray tubes for oscilloscopes. Later I broadened the portfolio with tubes for the Tornado military jet and for military helicopters. Here we did redesigns to increase lifetime. Unfortunately this made the products too good with a lifetime of 25.000 hours so no replacement parts were needed any more. We had 20% market share with oscilloscope CRTs. But then the price started to go down with increasing production from far east. So we were forced to stop production at a certain time when the business was not profitable any more.

DREI H Vertriebs GmbH (Chord ULTIMA PRE3)