Hello, looking for Carver amp info the read out there is a little sketchy. Is that place still in business? And who is actually making the amps? Do the have a factory in the Pacific Northwest….I live in the Pacific Northwest so I could drive there if I had a problem.
I need a tube amp for my Klipsch speakers, you tube heads out there is this the brand I should buy or is there a better option?
I can still remember in the 70s when my father in law went to the factory and grabbed me a Phase Linear amp and preamp off the factory floor..I had more problems with that thing, once and a while it made a super load pop when you turned it on..
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.
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 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.
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!!
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."
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.
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:
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…
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.
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
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.
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.
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
I am a Carver fan. I have owned his Crimson 350 tube amps for four years. They are remarkable because they have the finesse to sound great very sensitive speakers like my Klipsch Cornwall IIIs, but yet have plenty of power to get the most from my lower sensitivity Ohm 4900s. I believe that they sound better than the vintage and modern McIntosh amps I own.
Carver vintage gear, when brought back to spec, challenges the performance of modern products at many multiples of the Carver vintage prices. Some of my favorite vintage Carver gear is his C-1 preamp, the C-4000 preamp (they are stone silent with many great features including MC/MM; take or leave the Sonic Holography), and the M-400a Cube Amp.
Bob is an easy target for ridicule. He is an outspoken marketing genius who turns off many purists. Most of those purists haven’t spent much or any time with his gear. Too bad for them - it’s their loss.
My only regret about Carver gear is that I didn’t buy the Silver Seven amp when I had the chance. Seven hundred tube watts per channel is just enough!
Mr. Bob carver made some okay stuff and made some decent audio equipment. I remember the little m-400 power amp. Very clean and efficient that little square box push my jbl 4345 Very nicely. I sold it some years later but wish I kept it. Never own any carver tubes equipment but I damn sure heard them performed. Very sweet and musical. I’ve own stuff from fisher tube equipment parasound audio research mcintosh threshold nakamichi. The point I’m trying to make is not all audio gear is pleasing to all. Pick what sounds good to you and jammed on
Bob Carver Amplifier Design Philosophy — What Sounds Good?
Since the early days, after earning my physics degrees, my approach to audio design has created controversy.
My unconventional approach has brought both criticism, accolades and world-wide recognition for achieving musical excellence from my wonderful fans. World-wide recognition for offering a more affordable product, compared to most other brands of comparable products. It’s a great pursuit. Myriad technological advances have emerged from someone doing things differently.
My amplifiers have often been smaller, lighter, and less costly than others —while remaining powerful, musical, and accurate. These designs and their musical performance are quite successful. I do indeed make comparisons between my design practices and those of other designers. This is done not to foster a “Carver against the world” attitude but rather to highlight significant creative differences. Most other designers have chosen a heavily-trodden path; I simply take a fresh route.
What makes an amplifier sound good?
Dynamic power, low distortion, and wide frequency response. My tube amplifiers have high voltage (B+); the power supplies are able to “bounce” and increase voltage, closely tracking the musical load with very little distortion. This is an important key to musical performance that cannot be revealed by hooking an amp up to a resistor.
Do you design amplifiers using load resistors or speakers?
Both. On my bench I start out with resistors, then I use different speakers with a scope and voltmeter connected, while playing music and measuring the amp and speakers reacting together. The back EMF that is present makes speakers slightly easier to drive. Power response, by design, tapers below 80Hz, yet frequency response goes below 20Hz.
My designs will drive difficult loudspeaker loads, playing music far better than the specifications listed, without clipping, and with lots of headroom available.
These long held design targets have served Carver well. The designs have delivered excellent performing, highly musical products that more people could afford, without sacrificing the powerful and musical performance desired when powering loudspeakers.
Stay tuned for more of my very latest designs and the on-line store coming soon.
My name is Jim Clark. Bob Carver started a company of his own early this year and ask me to run it for him. I accepted and went to work. We turned the place upside down and started over fresh.
There is no-one remaining here, that is associated with a past. Its Bob Carver, myself and a team of aerospace engineers, building some great products.
Bob is enjoying his time designing circuits and spending time with his wonderful wife.
Bob’s recent tube amps have came under scrutiny for being too lightweight and having smaller output transformers relative to the power rating. This is nothing new. You older fellows remember the controversy surrounding the 9 lb. 200WPC M-400 back 35-40 years ago. Much is the same as today.
Bob designs for music, running the widely varying impedance curve of actual loudspeakers, with high voltage tube amplifiers that raise voltage in response to the actual loudspeaker load impedance. Near resonant frequencies, a speaker impedance can rise to 30 ohms or more. The load is dynamic. Bob measurers the interactions between the amplifiers and various types of speaker loads, while making music.
Designing amplifiers to reproduce sine waves into a static resistive load as commonly tested (aka drainage) is not the same application. This adds cost and weight. Many heavy, expensive amplifiers that reproduce sine waves well, while running static resistive loads, suffer terribly when reproducing music and dynamic loads.
Bob, being a physicist, designs for the actual application of designing a musical amplifier. These high voltage, high headroom designs are some of the most musical you will find. The average tube amp uses 450v of B+ voltage, while Bobs designs run at 685v B+, more than 50% higher.
In Bobs words, "they make a nice wide voltage swing with lots of headroom."
"The high voltage supply cost less to produce and sounds better driving speakers."
"The smaller transformers sound great with this high voltage design."
Don’t take our word for it, have a 30 day risk -free trial in your system with no re-stocking fee. Hearing is believing.
Bobs lightweight, high voltage, high headroom designs, outsold other brands in more than 500 dealers across the USA for many years, during actual listening test, head to head with other more expensive, heavier amplifiers. Today, you can have the demo in your home for 30 days and you be the judge. That’s the real test of a musical audio products value to the customer.
Bob is back and we are doing well. Customers are taking the Carver Amplifier Challenge and enjoying the musical performance. We continue to earn our place in customers systems. No hype. Head to head competition.
The customers aways win in these challenges . They are the priority.
I am driving Klipschorns with Bob Carver 350 Monoblocks. The Khorns have Volti upgrades, so they are a bit more sensitive than stock...somewhere between 106-109 db. The Carvers are dead quiet and sound great, to my ears, and the sound is pleasurable through all volume levels.
The Audio Science Review has the Carver amp rated near the bottom of the SINAD performance chart, but they are the only tube amps on the chart as far as I can tell, so that's not really surprising:
I would like ASR to do some reviews of similarly priced/powered tube amps and see how they fall out C/W Carver.
Based on the ASR chart, the Benchmark AHB2 is the cleanest, most accurate amp they've tested so far, so I have been planning to purchase one to C/W the Raven monoblocks on my system to see if there is an audible difference between the best and the worst measuring amps on the ASR list. Should be quite interesting.
Take a look at Denis Had (of Cary fame) new inspire amps. He makes them himself one at a time point to point wiring. The new Inspire 300B PSE (parallel single ended) sounds outstanding at 12 W/Chan can drive most anything.
The redesigned Dynaco 35W amps would be worth looking into. Vacuum Tube Audio or Will Vincent come to mind. You will see.Dennis Had amps on ebay highly regarded. These are all reasonable cost. I would add a couple subs. Then you will really see improvement. Happy listening!
In the Bob Carver I stated output transformers, but all traqnsformers are in question The power transformer is rated at 180ma and 265 volts into a voltage doubler so less than 90ma is available per calculations on a power supply simulator. And the rated filament 6.3 volts current is rated 6.4 amps with an 8.45 amp load. Do you understand it now?
Hello silverfoxvtx1800. It is easy to knock a product you have never heard or never owned. Carver is so controversial folks love him or they hate him. He pioneered open baffel speakers with lots of woofers and long flat panel tweeters, itsy bitsy box speakers with passive radiators, tube amps you can put your hands on (the tubes!) when running full blast, and a very slim (almost a pole) tall speaker (uses a sub) that will out "reality" any speaker put next to it. That speaker, driven by Bob's big tube amp, put to shame a famous company's flagship speaker in a A/B comparison at a well known LA area dealer on the edge of a canyon a few years ago. The LAOC Audio Society was there. I have been a fan (obviously) for a very long time, owned the "Mag AMp M400," tuners, tape decks, speakers, and sold them in a retail setting. My 50 year old tuner failed recently, but I don't blame Bob. His gear was always reasonably priced.
Bob is easily bored and starts a new company every 10 years. Perhaps some of the folks involved in some of those companies were not A+ material, but it's not Bob's fault. Whatever you purchase, be sure you can listen to it in your home with the rest of your gear and return it if you don't like it in a week or so. Listen to it first, let your ears tell you if it's any good. Nobody else's opinion matters. I trust Mr. Carver. Happy Listening!
Avoid Bob Carver amps The Crimpson 275 that is rated at 75 watts per channel has 15 watt audio transformers under the big transformer cans. It only made 15 watts per channel.
I own the Black Raven 350-watt mono blocks and I am still really impressed. Way better than my previous amps. The Atmasphere M-60 Mk3 mono blocks and the Pass Labs 350.5.
I have nothing to offer on Carver tube products, but I do have an old M-200t poweramp whose duty has been just to run the midrange on the analog setup in my living room. It’s been hooked directly to a pair of Altec 511 horns w/Peavey drivers for the past 30 years. It is silent at idle, never pops on turnon or turnoff (both important with that load) and produces crystal clear sound. It won’t handle a capacitive load (goes into oscillation), but I don’t use one.
It is one of the famous or infamous ’magnetic field’ amps that tended to burn power supply resistors. I have a Carver receiver of somewhat later vintage that does just that if you don’t put a fan on top, but this one has never had a heating problem.
Never heard or sold one of his tube amps. Did sell his early PL 400 and PL 700 amps. They were capable of playing very LOUDly, but most of them failed for various reasons. Typically, the owner would crank them up "all of a sudden" and that would cause them to fail. Other times, the source would send a "spike" (not a technical term!) to the amp and whatever protection circuits it had would not function correctly and it would fail. My customers loved them when they worked, but much like Crown amps back in the day (solid state ones), they tended to fail rather regularly.
I heard that some live bands used the PL 700’s on stage, but I don’t personally know of any. I would have cautioned them to have some in reserve...
The speakers are Klipsch Forte IVs, looking at Horn Mono Quicksilver amplifier. Don’t remember the exact Carver amp I was looking at probably the one putting out the least watts.I just tried to go to the Carver online site, it keep telling me it doesn’t exist.
@silverfoxvtx1800-- an additional note -- you didn't say which Carver amp you were looking at, nor what your budget or power needs are. However, this summper I bought an LSA VT-70 for $1,300 and it is an excellent amp. EL34 output tubes and 35 watts per channel. You say you have Klipsch speakers (but didn't indicate which model) but I suspect the VT-70 might be more than enough for your needs. I've posted a short review elsewhere in the amps-preamps section of this forum. I think LSA is out of stock for this item right now but expecting another shipment here in the near future.
Obviously, disregard my post if you are headed in a different direction.
I too have read all the negative press about the recent Carver offerings. If that’s all I had to go on, I’d probably shy away also.
But my experience with the Crimson 275 says something different. A few years ago I bought a pair of Spatial Audio X3s. The amp I had at the time was a Decware Torii II. As much as I loved that amp, and I did love it, it would not drive the X3s sufficiently. Enter the 275. It did a wonderful job driving those speakers effortlessly. I had zero complaints with the performance of that amp.
Speakers and amp are long gone, but I wanted to share what I heard. I would constantly shake my head at how that tiny little light fly weight amp could sound as good as it did.
Almost forgot, I also have a Sunfire TSEQ10 subwoofer, two 10 inch drivers (1 active and 1 passive) with a 2700 watt amp. I don't think there is another sub out there that has this much power and at the same time only about 12 inches square in size. You can see the sub in the lower left corner of the front view pic of my system profile.
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