Know more about Carver amps

Robert W. (Bob) Carver shot to fame through Carver amps, as this American designer of audio equipment belonged to the Pacific Northwest region. With a sound education converting him into a physicist and an engineer, Robert W. (Bob) Carver was captivated by the audio equipment at a tender age. Bob Carver, who was instrumental in bringing out carver amps made use of his talent to bring out novel high fidelity designs during the 1970s, as he also stole the thunder for designing the powerful Phase Linear 700, at that of 300 W for each channel. This consumer audio amplifier was considered to be the most powerful model available during the year 1972.

Carver Amps modeling

After the first high-powered carver amplifiers were rolled out in 1971, Carver Audio had got the better of conventional wisdom to introduce one innovative design after another. When carver amps started to raise many eyebrows, Carver took this industry by storm in the mid 1980s as he challenged a couple of high-end audio magazines saying that he could replicate the sound of any audio amplifier given to him in one of his amplifier designs that came with lower costs.

For a man who became the cynosure of all eyes through the cavalier amplifiers, the challenge was set into motion when Audio Critic, an audio magazine, picked a Mark Levinson ML-2 as the object of challenge, to which Bob Carver responded by acoustically copying the design and selling it as M1. 5t amplifier and it was one of the top cavalier amplifiers.

Stereophile magazine was not far behind, and in the year 1985, the magazine threw a challenge at Bob Carver to make a copy of Conrad-Johnson Premier Five amplifier, which was also to be done within 48 hours and at the premises of the magazine’s office at New Mexico. The Conrad-Johnson Premier Five amplifier was also a noted component in the field of amplifiers, as it carried a price tag that went past $ 12,000.

It is worth noting that in these challenges, the challenging amplifier could be used only as a ‘black box’, and Bob had not an inkling of a chance even to remove the lid. Known to introduce designs that were blatantly aiming to cater to the mass market, and for the carver amplifiers that lacked aural perspicacity, Bob Carver made diligent use of null difference testing to copy the sound produced by the challenging amplifier and triumphed in the acid test subsequently. Making use of their own equipment, the employees of Stereophile did not make the grade in passing a single blind test, which had been conducted in their own listening rooms.
Carver amplifiers then brought out the‘t’ versions of amplifiers that incorporated the sound pertaining to Mark Levinson as well as Conrad Johnson designs, which only invited critical remarks from people who had failed to realize the significance of the challenge, which was about the possibility of duplicating the sound of an audio amplifier in two forms of completely dissimilar designs. Among the carver amplifiers, Bob took cue from the Silver Seven design that was the most esoteric and expensive conventional amplifier during that period to duplicate the sound and bring out M.4 Ot and other models that were sold as lower as 1/40th  the price of the original.

TFM series Carver amps

Carver amplifiers now began to introduce the robust and trendy TFM series amplifiers after Bob’s interest on the M-series amplifiers waned, where the TFM amplifiers were primarily introduced to drive the load related to the Amazing ribbon loudspeakers. The crowning glory of craver amplifiers took the form of Lightstar, and there were only about hundred of these carver amplifiers that were made, which eventually became a collector’s treasure item. The original known by the name of Lightstar Reference, took a dual-monoblock design as it also carried separate cords for each of the channels. There was also the version called Lightstar 2.0 that came with one power cord along with cost-saving measures to reduce nearly $1800 from the retail price.

Carver amps and names

Carver amplifiers were named where the names carried distinctly defined technical meanings, which had no relation with the actual designs as well as function related to the carver amplifiers.

The ‘Magnetic field coil power amplifier’ is one of the noted carver amplifiers. The audio-amplifiers belonging the vacuum-tube era had made use of transformers, as coils of wire were incorporated for converting the high-voltage and the low-current output pertaining to the output tubes to that of a high-current and low-voltage output to make it suitable for loudspeakers. Carver amplifiers make use of transistors like other amplifiers as output transformers are not put to use anymore. Also, Carver’s U.S. Patent 4, 218, 660 illustrates the significance of a power supply, where the input switches get activated and de-activated at an ultrasonic rate as a measure to get adapted to the varying power demand related to the amplifier. It is not the amplification circuitry, but the power supply that carries the innovation, as it is also not in the usage of coils or a coil, but in the way the switching is used.

The ‘auto-correlator’ according to the U.S. Patent 3,989, 897 is a multi-band variety that carries single-ended dynamic noise filter. Incorporating the same circuitry, the Model 4000 preamplifier and the Phase Linear 1000 bring out noise reduction through four bands. One of the bands found in the bass works to suppress the turntable rumble, and three bands in the treble works to suppress the tape hiss. The noise filters don’t get controlled through a correlation process, but by the signals obtained from the bandpass filters. Correlation is but a process to compare two or even more signals, but auto-correlation is a process in which a signal is compared with varied delayed versions of its own to know about the degree of similarity that exists at different delay times.

The ‘Sonic holography’ comes with the enhancement pertaining to stereo imaging by bringing in a delayed as well as an equalized signal and the source is the left channel belonging to the right loudspeaker for canceling the signal emitted by the right loudspeaker at that of the left ear of the listener, as it happens vice-versa also.

In case of the ‘asymmetrical charge-coupled detector’, it doesn’t carry the FM detector circuit pertaining to Caver’s tuners. According to the U.S. patent 4, 457, 012, it is a process concerning single-ended dynamic noise-reduction that gets applied to that of the piercing left-minus-right component related to a FM-stereo signal that is weak, where artificial ambience generation gets added for compensating the loss of ambience that arises owing to noise reduction. and that is the brief history of Carver amps.

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Educated as a physicist and engineer, he found an interest in audio equipment at a very young age. He applied his talent to produce numerous innovative high fidelity designs since the 1970s. He is known for designing the Phase Linear 700, at 350 W per channel the most powerful consumer audio amplifier available in 1972. He went on to found the Carver Corporation in 1979 and Sunfire in 1994.

Is it possible to make a $700 “mainstream-audio” power amplifier sound exactly like a high-priced perfectionist Carver amplifiers? Bob Carver, of Carver Corporation, seemed to think he could, so we challenged him to prove it.

The question posed above seems laughable. If it were possible to make an average, modestly priced amplifier sound just like state-of-the-art, wouldn’t it already have been done? Of course it would. State-of-the-art sound would thereby become much more affordable, and high priced power amplifiers would become as extinct as Diplodocus (footnote 1). That is the conventional wisdom. Bob Carver, founder and personification of Carver amplifiers, has never been noted for his conventionality.

Ever since he introduced the first high-powered solid-state Carver amplifiers in 1971, Carver has been laying waste to conventional wisdom with one brilliant design innovation after another the “magnetic amplifier,” the “peak unlimiter,” the “sonic hologram generator,” the “auto-correlator,” the “asymmetrical charge-coupled FM Detector,” and the “digital time lens” (footnote 2).

But everyone has his limits of capability, and pride goeth before a fall; when Bob claimed, some time ago, in conversation with Stereophile Publisher Larry Archibald, that he could make his $700 Model 1.0 Carver amplifiers sound “indistinguishable from” any amplifier of our choice, we were confident that he was finally out of his depth. Carver amplifiers Corporation is, after all, a “mainstream” manufacturer, not a “high-ender”. Bob’s designs are unabashedly aimed at the mass market, notorious for its lack of aural perspicacity. What, then, could he possibly know about the design subtleties that make a Stasis 500 sound different from an Eagle 7A? Bob’s claim was something we just couldn’t pass up unchallenged.

Our first task was to come up with a “reference” amplifier that would represent a genuine challenge one as different from, and as superior to, his solid-state Model 1.0 Carver amplifiers as possible. One obvious contender was a large tubed amplifier we had on hand, but we soon realized that our choice would not be all that simple. There were, it seemed, some peripheral considerations.

We knew that Carver Audio couldn’t possibly pull this off, at least not to the point where none of us would be able to distinguish between his modified 1.0 and our reference amp. After all, some of the most highly trained audio ears in the world would be listening for the differences. What worried us was the possibility that Carver amplifiers might come so close to matching the sound of our reference amp that its designer/manufacturer would be embarrassed, chagrined, and outraged. And, while not normally concerned about offending a manufacturer in a product, we are concerned about fairness.

In order to select a reference amp for this experiment, we could be obliged to “single out” one model of one manufacturer’s line. If Carver amplifiers then managed to even approximate the sound of that Carver amplifiers, its manufacturer would quite naturally ask “Why us? Why did you single us out for ridicule?” And we would be hard put to answer without appearing unfair.

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So, we decided to make an exception to our usual policy of forthrightness. We decided not to reveal the “reference” amp’s identity, saying only that the reference unit is a high-powered, very expensive stereo unit with a strong and unique sonic “personality,” and a penchant for being very finicky about the loudspeakers it works with (footnote 3). It was, we were gleefully confident, likely to be very dissimilar in sound from Carver’s own designs, and probably much more unpredictable in terms of its behavior with a given loudspeaker.

We then turned to the matter of loudspeakers. Again, we wished (with no implied malevolence) to make things as difficult as possible for Carver, and were fortunate this time in that two speakers which seemed to meet that criterion were among the six then in-house for routine testing. We’re not going to identify them, either. Suffice it to say that both are exceedingly revealing of subtle details in the sound, are in different ways “difficult” loads for an amplifier, and between them, excel in every aspect of loudspeaker reproduction (footnote 4). We were confident that we had effectively stacked the deck against Carver’s success.
Although both Larry Archibald and J. Gordon Holt had met Bob Carver several times before, this was to be our first one-on-one association. We didn’t know what to expect. It turned out that Carver, too, had misgivings about us, based on past experiences with the “underground press and a normal anxiety about whether his success at meeting our challenge (about which he had no doubt) would be fairly reported.

We found Bob to be a friendly and personable gentleman, powerfully built, outgoing in manner, and just as serious about the reproduction of sound as are we. It took only an hour or so of relaxed banter before he confessed that he, too, was pleasantly surprised—to find that we didn’t have horns or cloven hooves.

Before Bob started work in earnest, it was necessary for us to all agree on certain ground rules, so that we could ultimately agree as to whether or not he had succeeded in accomplishing his goal. After some amicable discussion, we agreed on the following:

• The objective was to make the two Carver amplifiers sound absolutely identical, or at least similar enough in sound that none of us could tell one from the other with better than 50% (pure chance) consistency. Hopefully this was informative regarding carver amplifiers.

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