I can relate, I definitely had a few roller coaster GF's in my time. And not the fun "Woooooo" type of roller coaster, the "oh shit, I'm gonna puke, wait, this is awesome, nope, gonna hurl" type. Hell hath no fury and all that...
Probably on the order of a couple thousand hours, I don't think that there's any official rating for tube life for most tubes because of the variable nature of the operating points the designer could choose.
I've always wanted to try the 595's based on knowing that Tyll likes them quite a bit. I think that the pair he used to bring to meets were recabled w/ Cardas cable.
I don't think that any manufacturer would ever call a tube the same name and have a different pin configuration, that would strike me as absurd. And I just checked a couple of tube vendors (like thetubestore.com) and I don't see any mention of a different configuration for the 6H30Pi Gold version. You could always call some of them to check. Bottom line, I hope not since my Aikido (if it ever gets built) will use this tube and I already have a pair of the Pi's waiting to go in.
And welcome to Head-case.
So that makes it sound like they're going to try to take it live tonight but to expect periodic outages as they continue to tweak things. Translation, buckle up kids, it's going to be a bumpy ride.
They're like the tube equivalent of a VU meter, at least the type that I'm familiar with are. I didn't both to look up the specific type that this amp uses but odds are that they don't do anything other than complicate the build (two more heaters to wire) and are only there for aesthetic reasons. [edit]According to the info presented so far they look something like this:
and act something like this:
The one in my Dared knockoff is similar and is annoying as hell with the lights off, it's fracken bright as hell.
If you know the right person the MAX would probably come in around $300, but I think you made the right call with the Lunchbox, I heard the V1 and it's a heck of a little amp and won't temp you to tube roll since there aren't many alternates.
Am I the only one turned off by magic eye tubes? They just strike me as a bit gimmicky especially on something that looks as nice as that amp does already.