Rectifier tubes, current draw and plate voltage ?

[slegros]

Can anything be determined regarding the characteristics of a particular rectifier tube by the current draw or plate voltage on the power tubes?

For example: Testing 2 different rectifiers without changing any other tubes or touching the bias pot, and one Rectifier generates a reading 2mA higher or lower than the other, does that indicate anything about the sag or performance of the 2 rectifier tubes relative to each other?

If a higher plate voltage is recorded with one rectifier tube as opposed to the other does that indicate that the one that produced the higher voltage reading has less sag and is closer in performance to SS?

Just curious, thanks!

[SatelliteAmps]

Not really. 2mA is not enough of a difference to be able to determine anything definite. It doesn't really say a whole lot about the sag or the performance. Sag is a condition of the rectifier recovering from a voltage drop, not from a bias type test. Higher plate voltage is just that, it doesn't say anything about the Sag characteristics. A tube rectifier will have some sort of Sag to it, while a set of diodes (or some plug in solid state rectifiers) won't have any Sag that you would be able to hear. Some people design their solid state rectifiers to have an artifical amount of Sag to them.

[Swarty]

Higher voltage = higher plate current and not much else.