12-30-11: Hifihvn
One odd thing, Bob Carver always made it quite clear he is not a tube amp person. Who would have guessed.
Really? Here's an excerpt from a 1990 Stereophile interview:
Atkinson: One of them, of course, was the C19 tube preamp. That's the second tube product we've seen from you, the first being the Silver Seven power amplifier. Does this represent a new-found passion, or have you always been interested in tubes?
Carver: I started designing amplifiers when I was in the 7th grade. Transistors hadn't arrived on the scene, so all my early work was designing vacuum-tube amplifiers. My first passion is vacuum-tube amplifiers, I grew up with vacuum-tube amplifiers. I love vacuum-tube amplifiers, I love them to pieces. I had a fantasy amplifier that I carried around in my mind all of these years; I dreamed about it, on and off, through my military career, through my children being born, through being married. I even purchased some Acrosound A-450 output transformers in the early '60s; I've carried those transformers with me all through my life, waiting some day for the moment to arrive to put them to use. The Silver Seven is that Fantasy Island amplifier, but I never really had the time to do it until now. The basic topology of the circuitry, however, was really hatched years ago.
A secondary reason for the development of the Silver Seven was that I really did want to endow an amplifier with everything that I could possibly think of, or anybody else could possibly think of, that would make it a wonderful, wonderful amplifier. And that included the silver wire and the Wondersolder, the gold connections inside...
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12-30-11: Rlwainwright
Negative feedback, transformers? Ummm, no thanks. I'll stick with my BK Butler designed and built TDB-5150. BK's designs are revolutionary and the build quality is superb.
www.ButlerAudio.com
-RW-
Hardly a fair comparison when the Butlers cost over 2-1/2 times as much as the Bob Carvers. The Butler is no doubt a stupendous design. His guitar pedal effects are legendary and I have a friend who used to work for him and holds his abilities in awe. Still, that doesn't mean Carver's new tube amps should be dismissed because they have user-selectable feedback levels, which are probably relatively low (especially the 11dB setting) compared to many amps. |
01-02-12: Mitch4t
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I have been following Bob Carver's listings of his amps on eBay over the last year. He has totally redesigned his legendary Silver Seven amps. He calls the new beasts the Silver 900. They deliver 900 wpc of tube power, nearly double the power of the original Silver Seven. The original Silver Seven amps delivered 500 wpc....
Hey, Snohomish, WA (shipped-from location) is just up the road from me. I could save myself $360 by picking them up in person. Yippee. :-) |
01-04-12: Thankful
The Cherry 180 is a special amp. Does things I would not have imagined tubes would do well, like lightening dynamics and extended tight bass and ability to drive 1 ohm load.
There are tube amps that have high power, speed, extended bandwidth and tight bass (e.g., the VTL Siegfried Reference), but they're really expensive, hot and huge. It looks like one of the breakthroughs on these Bob Carvers is bringing this performance profile to more more affordable levels and reasonable size. No small feat. |
