[retailer]

That's an awful lot of beads, most of the setups I've seen have just the 1 bead close to the socket, the 6P25 valve is a high slope valve but not that high, 8.8 mA/V - an El84 is 10.5 mA/V, is it only the octal socket that causes problems, I see you have all of the wires from the octal socket going back to the banana sockets, why not try 3 wires from the 7 pin, 3 wires from the 9 pin and 3 wires from the octal - hope you get my drift.