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Bob Carver designed/manufactured gear

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stereoguy70

Well-Known Member
Just wondering how much love is out there in AK land for anything made by Bob Carver...be it Phase Linear, Carver, etc.

The gear I've come across seems technologically advanced compared to what came before it (much like most of the things Henry Kloss had a hand in) but of average to so-so build quality.

I am currently auditioning a Carver HR-772 AV receiver and it does sound nice, but a few issues have crept in on me......which are all currently fixed, and I'm attributing them to the age and lack of use of the unit, rather than design flaws.

What are your experiences with Bob's stuff?

Good? Bad? Indifferent?
 
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I used to sell Carver in the mid 80's to early 90's and my experience was not good. Apparently Bob had sold the company at that point and the accountants were really cutting the costs of the parts that went into building the units.

New products always arrived preceded by huge amounts of hype about how they were going to blow everything else out of the water due to some new revolutionary circuitry. When we compared them to many other brands we had on hand they often performed worse, and many had a very high failure rate. Then a new version would be hurried into the shops touting numerous improvements that would make the new version perform, with reliability, as the original one was supposed to. I had to wonder if the new one was so different and so much better, how come they had produced the original one in the first place with claims it could do what it clearly was not really capable of doing? Generally even the improved models were lackluster in performance and had a higher failure rate than other brands we carried.

I can't say if they are due to design or manufacturing cost cutting but I would say if your unit has issues, age may not be to blame.

Many people out there may have had Carver gear that was trouble free and may disagree with me. I am not saying every unit of every model broke, but I had a much larger sample size to work with over a longer period of time that almost any consumer would and I could compare to dozens of other brands over a similar period of time and that was my experience for units of that time period which I believe covers the 772.
 
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I was an early adopter of some Carver amp tech; the m1.0-t, s/n 00098.

Good value, dependable product for 20+ years,, 'amp'le power. I was a happy owner.
 
The two Carver amps I had were good and competent, but not great. Not as great as some of the Carver fans make them out to be. It doesn't "wipe the floor" with any high end brand out there, in other words. As for reliability, I had no issues with the M-500t I bought used (and have owned for over 20 years), but the M-400a I owned, I kind of shorted one of the outputs, and it pretty much wiped out the transistors. (I was asked to never bring it back for another warranty repair. :D ) But like any amps, they suffered from age. The M-400a started buzzing, then died completely. The M-500t is just tired at this point. I have no desire to put a single dime into it to restore it either.

But Bob Carver, left to his own devices and no budgetary constraints, makes some really nice tube amplifiers. (So, something like Carver Corp. was pretty much doing what they had to do, to survive.) What he knows about amplifiers in general leaves most of us in the dust. He also knows his own designs in and out, and won the Stereophile amplifier challenge decades ago by making his amp sound identical to a then-unnamed high-end brand. A true engineer and tinkerer--I have to admire that. :)

BTW, I remember Phase Linear being called Flame Linear, since so many went up in smoke. :D
 
I've had a 4000t preamp for a couple years now. Seems well made, works like a champ, but voiced a bit bright for my ears. Tons of features, very nice flexible phono section. I'm moving on though and will sell it soon.
 
Way back in 1985, I was looking to take a step up from a receiver to separates. In those pre-internet days, my research was mostly from magazine reviews. Carver seemed to fit my needs and my budget, so I took the plunge....M-500t amp, Model 4000t preamp, TX-11a tuner.
I was pleased with the performance back then, still am 32 years later....

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One only needs to look into the past to see just how influential Carver gear was, Many of the great rock bands of the past didn't use commercial amps for their huge venues. The Crown DC 300 were the stuff of the early big SS touring PA amps that were commonly employed for PA duty. A powerhouse in the days at 155 watts per channel the commercial Crown PA amps was the standard fair, then along comes the Phase Linear 700 with an easy 300 watts per channel and all the big names in history stacked these up for Touring duty driving them at full bore. Pink Floyd, Greatful Dead, and many others used them. Clair Brothers would do some work to them to make them a bit more rugged for touring duty but really there wasn't much out there that would give the power output for these big Rock bands in those days. So really Carver was not only innovative in their home stereo designs but they also played a role in the history of rock music as many of the great concerts that people attended in the past, their were Carver home amps behind those big speaker bins.
 
I've got three Carver amps doing daily duty, with two backups sitting around 'just in case'
M 1.5t
PM 1.5
PM 350.

the backups are another PM 350 and
TFM 15

The M 1.5t has been in almost constant use since I aquired it back in 1993 or so. I 'jumped ship' over to Bryston, and then Rotel for a couple of years, but the M 1.5t is, to my ears, far better driving my vintage Infinity and Magnepan speakers.

So, yeah, you could say I like Carver amps.
 
I had a Carver receiver - after some good evidence I felt it was low in bass response ... good sound otherwise.
Had a Carver C-1 preamp, great sound, but I found I prefer a preamp with remote features - at least Mute or volume control.
I have a couple of Carver TX-2, and TX-10 tuners that work really well - good sensitivity, quality sound, great value.
I have a Carver PM175 I got a few years back - use it as a backup but its been quite good with nice solid sound wherever I used it ... a keeper!
 
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I have a TFM55 amp. It sounds good and it looks good, but mechanical and thermal design are crappy. A real bean counters amp. Even if using the same electronic components, it would have been better, apart from some bad capacitors and the successful search to get the worst cheapest volume potentiometer they could find.
 
Back when I was a young bachelor (mid to late ‘70s) my system was double Large Advent speakers, Advent 300 reciever used as a pre, and two Carver m400 cube amps. That setup would rock out.
 
I guess I'm a bit of a Bob Carver fan......

TFM 55 driving Carver Amazing silvers
TFM 35 driving Magnapan MGIIIa's
M200t driving ADS L780/2's
M240 driving MB Quart's in the truck
PL400 awaiting the WOPL upgrade

Previously owned
2x M400 cubes
M1.0t
The Receiver

All always sound great and have survived various forms of neglect/abuse without issue.
 
I have had an HR-772 since new - somewhere around 1990. I never had a problem with it and am still using it today. It sounds good but it’s lacking something. It was built after Bob was forced out of his own company - at least that’s how I understand it went down. One of these days I’m going to try it as a pre with one of my other amps and see how that works out. Always wanted a set of Amazings. Someday.
 
Phase Linear Pro 700, never been fried. I did re-cap it but before I got my hands inside it was 100% original. Still has all original transistors and such. It never sounded right until the power supply caps got replaced though. They were run right to the margins too, 100v caps and the rails ran at 104 volts.

They weren't quite so prone to exploding as legend has it, unless you just abuse the hell out of them. No protection circuits so if a transistor shorted you were likely to get full rail DC voltage at the speaker jack before the fuse blew. They also produced enough power to melt unworthy speakers. I fried both woofers out of my JBL L-40's when a cable came off on me. 350 watts of 60 hz hum cooked the woofers and then blew the main line fuse before I could get to the power switch. Amp survived fine other than the fuse.
 
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