Peeking inside a Carver Crimson 275 Tube Amplifier

@mulveling

These amps might well sound good, but it’s looking more and more like they should have been spec’d at a much, MUCH lower power. Now where’s the value? Plenty of low power vintage amps that sound wonderful. EL84, 6L6, and EL34 tubes are hard to make sound bad.

I’m not disagreeing with you, perhaps the specs are inflated and I do not support that. The OP and others posting here say it’s a very good sounding amplifier, to me that means something. ASR seems to care little (If any) about how a product sounds. What do you hear? That’s the essential question.

We’ll let’s talk about what I would hear. The manufacturer of my speakers says 100 watts are to be seen as an absolute minimum and it’s highly recommended to be ran on 200 Watts. It’s easy to hear noticeable differences going from 100 and then 200 W with my speakers. So having been a carver fan and owning twin C-500’s vertically bi-amped, I toyed with buying 275s. Can you imagine how incredibly angry I would have been? He, the manufacturer, Mr. Carver, is saying his amps put out 75 watts… it’s not true.. but he’s not even close. He puts out something like 17 W. You’re telling me I should be just OK with that because it might sound nice on some efficient speakers? 17 is not 75. And hiding the fact by putting teeny weenie little tiny transformers under big gigantic covers is just fraudulent.

Funky54, I think you are making a big assumption, which may be true or it may not be true.  That assumption is that ASR's testing was accurate and that it actually had a Crimson 275.  

The models ASR tested did not have serial numbers.  The build quality from pictures is not consumer grade or fit for resale.  

Did you know Wyred4Sound makes these amps for the Carver Corporation?  They must be in on the scam too. 

Look, if the Company made material misrepresentations then that is terrible. But don't you, or the numerous folks piling on the ASR forum recognize how absurd this would be?  It would be one thing to miss your specs by a bit.  Here, if ASR is correct then the Crimson 275 only makes 22% of its specified output.  

The Crimson 275 drove Kef Blades at Axpona a few years back with pleasant results.  Maybe they just love 17 watts of power to get them to sing.  I suppose that's possible.  I once had LS50s linked to a 300b SET and they sounded pretty good.  

I did drive Wharfedale Linton Heritage speakers with the Crimson too.  They are reportedly 90dB efficient and 6 ohm nominal impedance.  Had gobs of power for those loudspeakers. Maybe 17 watts is all you need.  

I used to play around with vintage tube amps. Lovely sounding amps, in the range of 20 - 35 Watts. With 90dB speakers, an honest 20 Watts is plenty to drive them quite loud for LOTS of music. It'll even sound very pleasing, too - good to the last Watt, so to speak. In an intimate setting, with a controlled playlist (lots of Krall etc) you may never want for power. The could even play dynamically compressed rock recordings very loud (and they weighed more than the Carver, btw). But it would run out of power in a hurry once you started cranking more dynamic material. 

Modern push/pull amps with KT120 are SUPPOSED to give you all the power and overhead you need, at meaningfully low distortion levels, with a good dose of the tube sound if not the full boat E84/6L6/EL34 "sweetness".