I came across a listing with two EYE 400w MV lamps, and the odd thing was that the label on the package and the etch said that the lamps were made in China.
This is odd because EYE lamps are usually made in Japan, so seeing one that was made in China is definitely weird.
Does anyone have more info on Chinese made EYE lamps and does anyone know if the quality is better or worse than the Japanese made ones?

Yesterday an unused UK-made 90W SLP Sylvania LPS with a very damaged outer jacket was given to me for free from a store,
and I removed the tube from the cracked, (lost vacuum and missing pieces) outer jacket.
The tube itself still has vacuum and glows. Any ideas what should I do with it?
(For example, should I have it running like a decorative neon tube or just have it around for experiments like tesla coils etc.)?
Any ideas? 

For a short time there was a variant called Philips MLL-N available. Never seen one in person though. All of them I have are ML and one MLL.

The most important thing to avoid such things is to make your question as good as possible. This means for lighting devices that you should include a datasheet with current and voltage, specify your mains voltage and frequency etc.

For ballasts, this is not always easy to find. They're also often designed to be 'user friendly' which means that the current/voltage is not always specified, only 'X watts'. When the input from the manufacturer is vague, the output from people who are trying to help will also be vague. Garbage in, garbage out. Vossloh Schwabe often prints the different compatible lamps including their running currents on the ballasts, which is awesome, but that's far from universal.

There are also different types of ballast. Over here, the most common one is a simple coil in series with the tube. Leakage transformers are very rare here. So that kind of stuff you also have to take into account to specify. 

If everything is quite vague, it will take some discussing and potentially conflicting opinions before you get to a workable solution. That's the reality of online collaboration between different people. I've seen on many occasions people getting angry and moan at the people who are voluntarily trying to help them with electronics engineering and repair related questions and are discussing amongst themselves to figure out what's right. And to those i can only say:

Go find an engineering/consultancy firm, and specify that you only want one single answer and one answer only - even if that means that you might miss some important nuance.

Another pet peeve that has really been bothering me is that I often get frustrated whenever I encounter collectors who give contradicting advice when it comes to lamp/ballast combinations in which a European collector might claim that the setup is “compatible” and “safe” while a North American collector would claim that the same lighting setup is “incompatible” and “dangerous”. Has anybody else ever dealt with a similar situation like I have been facing?

Found out that a SON 70w will happily ignite on a 80w HPL-N ballast if you parallel a fluorescent lamp starter to the lamp. Gotta remove the capacitor from the ballast to measure the current (even without lamp it shows 500mA of current, of course with a power factor of zero), but it's likely gonna be pretty damn close to the normal operating current of the SON 70w.

They're fairly quiet sounds, recording them is indeed not too easy unless you already have a proper portable recorder like the ones from Zoom or Roland.

If you don't need them urgently, i can make a few tries. I tried with a contact microphone and i instantly run into two problems: RF clicks from the starter, and inductively coupled hum from the ballast. So the only option would be to use a well shielded condenser/electret microphone, because a dynamic will gladly pick up the magnetic field from the ballast. I do have one, but i need to set up everything outside of the room with my computer. But that's exactly where all my lighting stuff is.

I don't have any EOL tubes. I can make them plink a few times if i lower the input voltage to 190v or so, but they start annoyingly easy.

Yeah, that could work. But there is one thing... I don't have such a good microphone. I have a microphone on my phone and it always picks up some background sounds. But of course there are many tools to remove background sounds...

Get an eol tube and a noisy starter. Record the sounds along with the ballast hum. If you are wanting to make multiple (like a room full) record multiple startups of the lamp (maybe different starter) and change loudness (amplitude) and overlay them. That should get you a decent sound.

Hi

Can someone help me remake sounds of fluorescent starter chimes and 50hZ ballast hum? I have no idea on how to create similar sounds. I am just considering to make an animation with fluorescent lights turning on (and perhaps an EOL lamp). Any help would be appreciated. And of course I can use ready sound effects as well 

Also, any help with the animation itself is appreciated. I will probably be using Blender as it's free. But no hurries, as my current laptop can't run Blender that well (I'm saving for a more powerful computer).