Bob Carver tube amps

bob carver has been around forever, he has had ’many lives’ in the industry over the years, so to speak -- always iconoclastic, brash, against the grain in many of his hifi audio endeavors... i too have been a fan of his gear at certain times (still have his lightstar reference linestage -- it is simply brilliant), but at others, i have to shake my head

this recent wave of amplifiers are interesting and controversial, to say the least, the claims made in marketing and selling these lightweight units do stretch the belief systems of many an experienced hobbyist to be sure

Besides the extremely questionable power ratings, what I find most disingenuous about the previous Carver co. was its bold proclamations for a "lifetime warranty" and "20 year tube warranty" (or whatever it was, exactly) when the average lifespan of a Carver co. incarnation seems to be 10 years or less. Good luck getting those claims fulfilled in the future. 

"Lifetime warranty" refers as much to the lifespan of the company as it does the end user....

yes indeed, it is good to be reminded that a promise is only as good as who it is that is making it

The greatest issue, concern and potential problem, failure, and breakdown mode of any Carve rproduct is FIRE. He is famous for his flaming amplifiers nicknames "Flame Linear" and "Sure Fire" you will want to be cautious regarding their placement and installation and keep them away from any flammable materials.

None of Carver's businesses last very long he is great on ideas but not much else.

Not specific to Carver, but I would not buy equipment from a company on the edge of viability. Service in the future will be a disaster, unless you live in an area where you’ll be able to find good independent audio repair shops.  And, given all the choices, I wouldn’t buy equipment with extensive quality concerns. What’s the point? Life is too short

Have a great day

I saw some recommendations for Line Magnetic amps here. I don't know how the customer support in the United States is, but my customer journey with the Line Magnetic LM-503PA Mono Vacuum Tube Amps in Vienna is terrible.

Spoiler: Would I recommend buying a Line Magnetic product? Not when you are in Germany or Austria.

In the Summer of 2021, I spent 10k on a pair of Line Magnetic LM-503PA mono vacuum tube amps. This was by far my worst decision in 40 years of buying hi-fi gear.

So far, I have enjoyed listening with the amps for 11 months. But for 5 months, I couldn't enjoy listening with the amps because of defects and ridiculous customer support. As I'm writing this, my Line Magnetic LM-503PA is defective at the distributor for repair for more than four weeks, and Line Magnetic has not even sent the missing spare parts from China to Germany yet. But this is just the tip of the iceberg of my terrible customer experience with a Line Magnetic product.

This is why I wrote a customer report about my journey with the Line Magnetic LM-503PA mono vacuum tube amp. The report is about many customer-unfriendly emails, a dealer who doesn't answers emails at all, the European Line Magnetic distributor holding my amp hostage, and Line Magnetic in China refusing to answer my questions.

https://www.pure-neo.io/writing/my-terrible-customer-journey-with-the-line-magnetic-lm-503pa-mono-vacuum-tube-amps

Carver gear, from vintage to current, is all I have ever purchased for audio.

Nelion, Hitech, (Greg and Roland) bring these great pieces back to spec and even a few “upgrades”.  But that is my decision to buy and have refurbished (mostly) before even plugging in most of them.

Tube amps are simple things.  Any competent repair shop will be able to “fix” any problems any newer tube amp might have in 20-30 or 40 years from now (if tubes are still being made by then(?))

But I have had even non-serviced 40 year old Carver equipment playing music and they sound great.  So getting “service” on 30-40 year old, 2d-3rd or 4th hand, equipment isn’t that difficult.

Not sure why there are so many trashing them.. If it sounds good to you, it sounds good to the only person that matters.

Jim Clark has been very responsive and helpful even for information on “older” Carver Silver Seven.  Probably going to get the RAM285.

Have an A760x from Greg at Nelion driving a pair of Tekton Double Impact SE right now, 100 db is what I am getting clean (measured with Pile meter) before I hear distortion..  Since I ordered them as bi-amp, I can use the RAM on uppers and the A760x for lower (have a couple of Tekton 2-10 subs ordered also)

the DIs do seem to like it better when I limit lower end to them to above ~40hz.

But I might just be hitting power limit.. Lights do dim a bit at times…

Balance of systems.. Nice, loud, great sounding music that doesn’t cost as much as a house…

Not sure why there are so many trashing them..

Nobody feels "good" when their $30K amp gets run over by a $3K amp. Bob’s tracking downconverter is patented and unique to Carver. While his amps have "get up and go" to provide unlimited headroom other $$$ amps just "get up and and blow up" if they even come close to pushing that type of power. The customer that dropped kilobucks on what is essentially a bunch of watts being converted to heat is not pleased:

I had a Sunfire Signature 600 II, and remember it distinctly as the worst sounding 2ch amp I’ve ever owned in 20 years. It got used for like a week before I couldn’t stand it anymore and put back in the PS Audio HCA-2 (also very efficient, certainly no heat converter), to great relief. Then acquired a Parasound A21 - even better. Nowadays I own mega-buck amps, to great satisfaction. But if people are happy with these Carver/Sunfire amps and feel they are superior to $30K (or more) amps, I say good! More power to them! It didn’t work for me.

Ha, ha, "Tracking Downconvertor™". Carver has always been clever at designing an unusual circuit, and then giving it a comic book sounding name, such as Magnetic Field Coil or "autocorrelator". (Who wouldn't want that?)

My favorite is "asymmetrical charge-coupled detector."

What's yours?

@cleeds 

Too many to count:

https://www.bobcarvercorp.com/patents

The Sunfire 7401 7 channels x 400 watts each= 2800 watts

Price=$4450/2800 watts= $1.58 per watt

Then you have to factor in the cost savings on your energy bill because it doesn’t need to pull and store constant power, it pulls as needed.

Take your favorite amp and run the numbers, is there any other 400 watt a channel amp available at $1.58 a watt? What about a 300 watt/channel? 200w? 100W???

Parasound A21 300w a channel x2=600 watts

Price= $3000/600w= $5 a watt, if it sounds better it should at more than 300% the cost!!

I would like to add that I own a pair of the Carver M 350 Black Raven/Beauty Amps. These amps replaced Ralphs Atma-Sphere M-60’s Mk3-3, which replaced a Pass Labs 350.8, 350.5 and before that a Krell KSA 250. I actually had Bob stay at my house for a couple days when I was also trying his Line Source Speakers. (I didn’t like them).

To my ears and present equipment, these amps are very good in terms of sound quality and power available. Of course, as noted, I haven’t tried too many amps.

And BTW, I still own and operate one of the Carver M400 cube amps in my game room.

ozzy

I had a pair of JBL 230’s sitting on my desktop powered ny a Parasound Z series (Zamp, ZDac, Zpre). All is well and I see a Carver AV505 amp on CL for like $200. I already owned a Sunfire processor and subwoofer so on a lark I pulled the trigger. First thing I notice is the build, as in like a tank with rack handles. Second thing I notice is the THX certification and the gain knobs for each of the five 80 watt channels. The third thing I noticed was as soon as I hooked this thing up was my JBL 230 speakers sounded like I was hearing them for the first time. The soundstage blew out from wall to wall and what was unexpected was I had never heard a soundstage extend from floor to ciling before. The strengths of the JBL’s were brought forward and the clarity, preciseness in the soundstage were intoxicating. Within 30 minutes I was getting complaints from my condo association, as I continued to turn up the wick. This was paired with the Parasound Z preamp. Intrigued I pulled out some decent but entry level Athena bookshelf speakers. Again, unrecognizable, they went from entry level to really good. I said OK, let’s see what this puppy can do.

I take my Paradigm Studio 20 passive speakers out of my home theater as surrounds and mount them on stands as proper L & R channels in the main room about 10 feet away from the MLP. Then I BI-AMP them so I have two channels powering left speaker and two powering the right. I also take out the Parasound pre out and insert the Sunfire Theater Grand 3 in two channel mode. Then I hit play and I was immediately surprised. I didn’t know that these speakers could sound this good. I had been running them with a decent amp as surrounds.

When I researched WHY this amp was knocking my sox off I found that the Carver A series used the same power supply as the famed Carver Lightstar.

The big brother, AV705 has even more power if you can find one.

So, the moral of the story is a $200 CL find of an amp from the nineties made my speakers sound like they cost MUCH more than the MSRP. This was like steroids for speakers. This isn’t even close to being one of Carvers best amps but this thread made me want to share why I am so pleased with Carver/Sunfire amps.

I've owned a lot of Carver gear since 1986 and they were excellent in both sound quality and reliability.  But it's fair to say that his products evolved and that his engineering genius and passion could occasionally outpace his business sense.

I've owned four Sunfire Signature amps running (now restored, they lasted over thirty years before requiring a rebuild of the Bohlender-Graebner Ribbons) a pair of Plat Amazing Loudspeakers (w/outboard custom-designed subs) multichannel system and they are the best Solid State amplifiers I've ever heard. (And I own a number of the Mac amps that inspired them.)  His tube amps are something with which I have no experience besides having heard them in other systems.  They sound quite fine, even on challenging Telarc Organ recordings with first-octave Bass.  The Carver Corporation A-series amps are close to the same designs as the Sunfires.  (I.E., "Light Star"...)  If I were seeking out a 75wpc tube amplifier, I'd probably look at a McInlosh MC275.  The hyperinflation in High-End Audio is doing serious damage to the future of the hobby.  The industry needs someone like Bob to bring the "knee in the price/performance ratio J-Curve" back down to Earth.