Carver Power Amps

Pro sound amps, which Carver now makes, are serious business, not a hobby, and performance (and price) sells. The current Carver ZR 1600 (PWM digital)is specd both at 1 khz and for 20 to 20KHz, 660 and 600 watts respectively into 4 ohms. Not much difference. "Power Bandwidth" is specd also: 20 to 20KHz. Below 60 watts, where the amp will mostly operate in the home audio application, distortion is comparable to "audiophile" amps, and much better than some. At 600 watts they just say "less than 0.5 percent". The "less than" terminology reflects typical professional conservatism. I have an ancient "outboard" Shure phono preamp specd at "less than 1 percent" but when tested it's good to 0.1 percent just like any other decent preamp circuit.

The ZR 1600 has recieved glowing reports from those who have tried it. Perhaps it's the Spectron without the audiophile hype. At less than $800 a copy it's worth a trial, and I have a set of three on order to drive my array of Magneplanars and subwoofers.

Being a digital amp, efficiency is very high so I will save a few bucks on electricity. And, just like military electronics, they actually quote a MTBF (Mean Time Between Failures) at 43,824 hours! Can a Krell match that?

Actually, the Carver pro is tottaly unrelated to Carver as they are seperate companys.
The zr series is based on tripath technology,therefore would be more likely to sound like a Bel Canto amp than the Spectron.

I just may order 3 of these myself.

Ears...I made a typo.. it is less than $900, but may be down to $800 by the time you order. I was going to order one and give it the listening test. But then I really needed three channels for the Maggies, that meant two Carvers. But that left one unused channel, so why not get one more Carver, and use each one in a mains/subwoofer application. (I have three SW). Please don't get me started on the rear channels!

If you are just involved with 2-channel, the cost to check out this new technology is so low that it is hard to pass up.

Being a prosound unit it has lots of nice bells and whistles, like remote turn-on by 12VDC, with delayed 12vdc ouput so that several amps can be daisy chained with staggered turnon so you don't open a 115vdc breaker.

Paulwp: I dont think anyone here was trashing it to begin with. But the ORIGINAL THREAD STARTER asked a question about why the amp sounded weak and thin. Myself and a few others who have actual experience with Carver amps gave honest opinions. Or in this case I should say honest facts. First off, its not a true 380 watts per channel amp. Its more like a true 100 watt per channel amp. Lacking bass? Could be depending on the reactive load. If Carver is going to exaggerate its true RMS output, whose to say he isnt going to exxagerate of performance aspects as well?? Then you get a guy who comes onto the thread up in arms about how great the Carver product is, but at the same time that same poster has more money invested in EQ's and sound shaping equipment than proabaly the rest of the BB combined. I dunno bout that.........

Danvetc: "typical audiophile bullshit".

Typical audiophile bullshit is in fact a company like Carver. They are almost soley responsible for leading the pack on false advertising,super point markup and "power ratings". When I used to work for Lechmere back in the late 80's we had alot of Carver products for display and sale. We used to get bonus spiffs everytime we were able to sell a Carver product to the tune of an extra 15% on an items retail tag(if we sold a $1000 Carver amp we got an extra $150 in our paycheck). We even had a rep. come in who distributed Bob Carver products to help us sell the stuff. He was doing a demonstration on some of their amplification and pre amp products and told one of the employees to get a Similiary priced Sony(Sony recievers were big into "effects" and "surround modes" at the time, probably still the same way) receiver to show the difference in clean power output between the 2 products. The salesman wouldnt use an Onkyo product though when one of the older salesman offered him to use that. We later found out why when the Rep. left. A small basic no frills Onkyo reciever rated at around 60 watts per channel was able to drive a pair of 4 ohm speakers with a much fuller sound and with much better output than a Carver product that was 4 times the price with an advertisement of 10 times the output power into the same impedance. That Philosophy still holds true today folks. Something I dont buy into. And people here know that I have no problems with amplifiers with "lower price tags" over alot of the Mega Buck Levinson or Rowland equipment. Im the first to admit that pricetag doesnt mean jack and that great sounding amplifiers can be had more minimal money, but Carver isnt one of them. Least not with the Audiophile speakers I have alot of familiarity with. Fast forward 10 years to when I worked with the Tweeter Home Entertainment Group. Our store was the first to get a pair of Sonus Faber Amati Homage speakers in the country. We had just sold off our last floor demo Adcom product, and a B&K amp we had had some serious noise in one of its channels(Typical for B&K)and needed to be sent out. So the Store Manager actually pulled down a Carver amplifier that was up in the luch room to temporarily power it for the evening until we could get a transfer in from another store. The amplifier was rated for around 4-500 watts into 4 ohms. Once hooked up to the speakers, we were more than dissapointed. The amp could barely drive the Amati's to normal room volumes. And it did it with an "out of phase thin sound". Very poor to say the least. I always question a product though when on the back of the unit it states maximum power consumption of about 3-400 watts, then has power ratings of at least twice that per channel in the manual. If something consumes only a few hundred watts of power going into the amp, how does it produce more than twice or 3 times that amount coming out of the amp?? Gotta love Carver......... If Im going to get into Proaudio gear, Ill stick with companies like Ampeg, or Line6. If Im going to stay in hifi audio, Ill keep to my guns and stay away from Bob Carver products.

Put up a similiar priced and "rated" Rotel RB-1090 against ANY current Carver product with similiar designations, I know which I would choose....