Bob Carver tube amps

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.