Recommendation GC-MS/MS: Thermo vs. Agilent

[foodbiochem]

Dear all,

would you have experience with one of the following two GC-MS/MS systems to comment on their performance?

- Thermo Trace 1310/ TSQ 8000 Evo (EI) (Software: Chromeleon)

- Agilent 7890B/ 7000D triple quad MS (EI/CI bundle)

For both with additional FID as detectors and autosamplers/sample managers for SPME & headspace.

We would need this system mostly for analysis of plant phytochemicals, e.g. fatty acid methyl ester analysis, sterols, oxysterols, monosaccharide/linkage analysis (after derivatization), SPME and headspace of volatiles. (mostly EI, on a later date possibly CI upgrade for the Thermo MS).

Which one would you recommend regarding durability, reproducibility, intuitive use....?
For Thermo, would you recommend Chromeleon or Xcalibur as software?

Thank you in advance for any inputs!

[James_Ball]

We have the Agilent 7000C with Mass Hunter and it has been quite rugged so far after two and a half years. Ours is setup with the 7693 vial autosampler on the front inlet and the EST Analytical Centurion/Encon Evolution purge and trap system on the rear inlet. We run both extractables and volatiles with this setup using a Y connector just before the inlet to the MS so there is no changing out of columns between sample types.

Mass Hunter is very powerful, but if you are doing quantative work with very long target lists (125 compounds for us on some methods) it can become a chore to update things like retention times if you switch to a different type of column. MSDChemstation was much easier with the EasyID tool which seems to be lacking in Mass Hunter Quant. However the tools for setting up MS/MS methods work well and are not difficult to use. We haven't moved into SPME yet, which would require the PAL autosampler.

[Rndirk]

Agilent 7000C here also (EI only), with the MMI inlet for PTV injection (which i highly recommend if you have plans to miniaturize sample prep).

Analysis => Food & environmental: pesticides, PAHs, PCBs...

We are happy with the performance, robustness and the software Mass hunter. That said we also use older versions of both chromeleon and Xcalibur on our LC systems which we both like. I suppose this is fixed in newer versions of Xcalibur but i personally dislike not having an overview of all your target molecules - the version we use is still one by one..