Carver Amazing Line Source Speakers

Ozzy I've been living with the ALS for 9 months now.  It's better than my $40k Raidho speakers.  However, speaker placement and room acoustics in addition to amplification plays a critical role in how they sound.  Most past shows demonstrating these speakers were got mixed reviews but the last AXPONA show they sounded decent.  Imho, I've haven't heard a better overall speaker regardless of price. 

Ozzy, your room dimensions are similar to mine, but I have 10 foot ceiling.  However, Bob designed the ALS to work with 8 foot ceiling so that it may be of benefit to you.  Good to see you have the four corners of the room treated.  I've found placing absorption panels in front of and slightly behind the speakers along the side walls (to absorb some of the sound from the side firing drivers) to be beneficial reducing some of the huge amount of spacial cues these speakers can generate. It focuses and gives more solidity to the images, especially vocals.  Also having absorption panel in the center of your front wall behind the speakers will improve image focus and solidity.  But you'll have to experiment. My room is a combination of aborption and diffusion panels.  Also placing the speakers out into the room as much as you can, really helps the sound stage.  I have mine out about 10 feet into the room and 3 feet away from the side walls.

Obviously, the Ravens are a great match for the ALS.

Ozzy, the ALS is nominally 8 ohm so the 8 ohm tap is the right choice. Bob confirmed this with me.   If you go with 4 ohm, it would probably will not sound as open or transparent.  But it won't hurt the amp or speakers if you try.  In most cases the higher tap will sound better if you can get away with it, unless you have a 1 ohm speaker like the Apogee Scintilla. Then you'd need the 1 ohm tap on your amp. 

Ozzy, I personally would not use the DEQX preamp built in crossover. I'm a minimalist at heart and don't like what the DEQX does.  I would connect your JLA sub amp to the the Raven amp via the high level connection using speaker wire (assuming the JLA sub accepts high level input, if not use the low level connection RCA/XLR).  It is considered by many to be the best way to integrate subwoofer to the main speaker.  I would go through the built in calibration of the JLA sub amp and then crossover at around 70 Hz as a start.  Then you'll need to play with the phase (start at 0) and crossover freq to get the most integrated and quickest bass response from the subs.  It's a lot of work.  If you don't have an SPL meter and want to do it by ear, get a nice head phone with a flat freq response (Senheiser etc).  Head phones are immune to room induced bass resonances.  Listen to a piece of music with a lot of acoustic bass instruments.  Compare the same music to what you hear through the head phone and through your speakers and get the speakers sounding as close to possible to the headphone bass.

Hope this helps.

Ozzy, the ALS does not sound good out of the box. You may even think there’s something wrong with the speakers. The sound will be too diffuse and the instruments won’t sound correct. It’ll almost sound like a defective Bose 901 at first. I notice improvement after 20 hours of continuous play with dynamic music. It will continue to improve to the 100 hour mark and will start leveling off. I wouldn’t consider them broken in until you hit 150 hrs.

When fully broken in, You’ll need to fine tune with the high freq and bass controls as their level is dependent on your room and electronics. The midrange control to me is not helpful. I have it dialed to 0.

Unfortunately, engineers, especially the ones who graduated just from college, only believe in what they can measure on the scope.  Break in as far as speakers are concerned is real, just like an old worn leather shoe feels much more comfortable than than a new one. The suspension of the the speaker driver including the surround and spider need to loosen up.  Almost all speakers I've ever owned in the past 30+ years showed a dramatic improvement in sound after break in period.

Ozzy, your experience with the Carver amp reminds me of mine with my Carver Cherry 180 amp. I bought it around 9 years ago. I bought a new custom speaker and started to drive it with the Carver. However, the bass sounded weak and the bias meter would go back and forth full sweep like crazy with bass transients. I thought there was something wrong with the amp. I called Bob, and he told me unequivocally it’s not the amp but the speakers. Well, he was right. The speaker designer reversed the mid/bass crossover with the tweeter section. I’ve also called him with other issues and he always came up with an answer to fix it. He’s like no other designer I know.