Carver Crimson 275 Review (Tube Amp)

[Doodski]

I'm fortunate: my late father-in-law was an electrician as well as a math professor (he was also a cook, but that's another story). So he made sure his oldest daughter was proficient with the tools and techniques of house wiring. This allows my strategy of acting incompetent and having her impatiently shove me aside and do it properly.

I am then forced to go pour myself a beverage and watch. Hard work, but someone has to do it.

Somebody has to be the safety monitor...

 

[traderitch]

That's a shame Paul. I'd be happy to write a letter for you, as your counsel. [Yes, I'm a lawyer.] I'm new to this forum so I don't know if you can PM me your contact information and I'd be happy to help. You and Amir may have saved a few lives!

One of the problems is solvency. I'm probably off here, but if the company sold 3000 of these amps at the tune of $2600 each that's $7.8M in customer money that needs to be refunded (assuming all customers want a refund). While there may be a legal theory that could trigger insurance coverage, would this type of company (a) have cash to cover a settlement or judgment; (b) would it have insurance limits that high?

I would think the company should just admit it made an error of omission on the ground and offer a retrofit with shipping paid both ways.

I believe you should be patient.

In your legal experience how would a return of purchase price be handled?
There are multiple layers involved.
Manufacturer.
Dealers - they took a spread on the sale.

 

[Fiddlefye]

I'm fortunate: my late father-in-law was an electrician as well as a math professor (he was also a cook, but that's another story). So he made sure his oldest daughter was proficient with the tools and techniques of house wiring. This allows my strategy of acting incompetent and having her impatiently shove me aside and do it properly.

I am then forced to go pour myself a beverage and watch. Hard work, but someone has to do it.

It was a good thing I'd swallowed my tea when I read that... I have been fortunate in having a long-ago adult violin student who worked as a electrician at Ford for his career and had a side-gig rewiring old homes. He had apprenticed with a chap a generation or so older yet and learned every trick in the book for getting around the obstacles in rewiring. we did it all without "gutting" anything and with almost zero plaster repair to be done. Rewiring in old homes requires a complete additional skill set to the basic electrician's repertoire. That and considerably greater thought and guile...

 

[Blumlein 88]

We're just about finished rewiring our 3+ story 1911 home (no ungrounded circuits now). Our insurance company informed us that without a rewire they would no longer insure. When I bought it had a mix of mostly two-wire knob-and-tube with some grounded circuits, but all had modern three-pin plugs. The previous owner had introduced some GFI plugs in an attempt to pretend the circuits were grounded but... We now have a 200 amp main panel, a 100 amp that handles the second and third floors and another 60 amp panel in the garage. A lot of work, but only cost about $3,000 or so in the end. One gets very devious at fishing wires after a while. This is the second old house rewire. The first was owned by an old electrician and had cloth lamp cord running to some of the outlets that were in the floor.

I of course don't know, but if you put a GFCI outlet on the first outlet (the one closest to the breaker) on a circuit of outlets it protects all of them even in two wire setups. That may be why some GFCI outlets were there. I'd guess the other 3 pin outlets were just so modern 3 pin plugs would fit. Better than nothing.

The problem is many old two wire homes, the usual method was to go from breaker to an overhead light, and branch from the light to each outlet in that room. A sort of star rather than parallel pattern. In such a case a single GFCI only helps with the one plug.

In your case now, you have it all redone to modern standards it sounds like.

 

[Billy Budapest]

I agree that those people who are getting anxious should step back a little. Give them a chance to come up with a solution — all of the players.

I am not an EE but to make the amp Class I compliant with a chassis ground or Class II compliant with double insulated wiring should not be hard.

 

[mhardy6647]

Never seen a Carver cassette deck, CD player or TV.

Dunno about "Carver", but Pioneer branded their top-tier cassette deck Phase Linear (at least briefly) after they bought the remains of PL from... whomever they bought it from.

I had a Carver CD player (dump find) for some time (model DTL-100, IIRC). It worked OK. It has a typically Carver-esque feature on a button called "Digital TIme Lens". I have no idea what it was supposed to do, much less what it did. The sound quality changed a tiny bit with the button in one position compared to the other; that's about all I can say about DTL.
I cannot find a photo at the moment, but it looked like this one -- albeit missing the trim on the CD drawer.

(borrowed image, obviously)

Not sure who bought the "Carver" brand name after the original morph of that company -- nor "Sunfire", for that matter.

 

[john2017]

Dunno about "Carver", but Pioneer branded their top-tier cassette deck Phase Linear (at least briefly) after they bought the remains of PL from... whomever they bought it from.

I had a Carver CD player (dump find) for some time (model DTL-100, IIRC). It worked OK. It has a typically Carver-esque feature on a button called "Digital TIme Lens". I have no idea what it was supposed to do, much less what it did. The sound quality changed a tiny bit with the button in one position compared to the other; that's about all I can say about DTL.
I cannot find a photo at the moment, but it looked like this one -- albeit missing the trim on the CD drawer.

(borrowed image, obviously)

Not sure who bought the "Carver" brand name after the original morph of that company -- nor "Sunfire", for that matter.

Carver was bought out by Pioneer in 1979, the same year Bob started Carver... Carver was bought in the late 80's by Phoenix Gold. He then stared Sunfire, which he ran until about 2006 or so. In each of the above cases, as soon as he took the businesses public, the board of dircetors took over and eventually removed him from his own companies.

Phase Linear launched the first CD player for commercial sale in the US, and also had a linear tracking turntable, which was based on the Pioneer PL-L1000

 

[Holmz]

What state is he in?

A “State of shock” ?

 

[restorer-john]

I had a Carver CD player (dump find) for some time (model DTL-100, IIRC).

That is a dressed up low-end Pioneer CD player from the mid 1980s.

 

[Doodski]

That is a dressed up low-end Pioneer CD player from the mid 1980s.

CooL. I always wondered what they are.

 

[Fiddlefye]

That is a dressed up low-end Pioneer CD player from the mid 1980s.

I had one that had a one-bit chip and sounded pretty good. I gave it away as part of a system for an impecunious, music-loving friend and a decade later it is still running fine. She's happy...

 

[Larry B. Larabee]

In each of the above cases, as soon as he took the businesses public, the board of dircetors took over and eventually removed him from his own companies.

He is a genius.

 

[Thermionics]

Well, It depends on what you mean by "commonly tested parameters." Are there tube amps that measure well? Sure there are--lots of them. You're almost always going to get higher THD and S/N ratios, to some degree, but I don't think that's a disqualifier. They're also very ineffiecient, of course. In terms of flat response across the audible spectrum, a well-designed tube amp can do very well.

Here's a triode Williamson with a Peerless OPT I just built for a friend, measured at 1 watt.

View attachment 180102
Square waves are very handsome at 10kHz and 40Hz, respectively:

View attachment 180103

View attachment 180104

It's very stable and has great realism and authority on efficient speakers. Transient response is good and low-frequency stability is very good. Power is 12wpc in the midband and 10wpc at the extremes, but that's the Peerless OPT. Some would consider this a poor weight-to-power ratio. But then look at the Carver. ;-) An Acrosound OPT will do better in terms of HF power bandwidth, but the Peerless has a sonic heft and solidity that the Acros don't. The Acros are also *much* harder to tame on the high end--multiple peaks and anomalies threatening stability.

For more power, look at the Macs, Eicos, ARCs, Fishers, Conrad-Johnsons and other well-made amps. Properly restored (and sometimes tweaked) they measure very well where it counts. ;-)

These amps I built, wired for ultralinear, will measure just as well with 22wpc. And these are VERY honest measurements, mind you. I don't count when they go into clipping, as harmless at that might be in a tube amp. ;-)

The output transformers are the key to any good tube amp. Without a good OPT nothing else really matters.

ETA: By "triode Williamson" I mean a classic push-pull, triode-wired KT66 amplifier. For those who are interested, here's the exact model for my amp with the same output transformer and a slightly modified power supply (one choke less, a higher B+), some stabilizing circuitry added, and using KT66's instead of 807s. You can see the fuller measurements here:

http://oestex.com/tubes/mus_amp%20.pdf

This was the first American adaptation of the Williamson design--an outstanding amplifier for it's day and holds up very well now.

Funny you should bring this up, this is my thread on AK for my W4-AM build, which I remember you participating in: https://audiokarma.org/forums/index.php?threads/gillespie-triode-williamson-build.795322/

 

[amirm]

I had a Carver CD player (dump find) for some time (model DTL-100, IIRC). It worked OK. It has a typically Carver-esque feature on a button called "Digital TIme Lens". I have no idea what it was supposed to do, much less what it did.

It applied what he had done to FM tuners. It computed (in analog) L-R signal, amplified it, and then reconstructed the original signal. Left minus Right has the difference or what makes the sound spacious in stereo so by doing this, it added artificial channel separation.

 

[restorer-john]

CooL. I always wondered what they are.

Actually, Come to think of it, I think it was a Yamaha CDX-2 dressed up/stripped down. It's so long ago now.

 

[dougi]

What state is he in?

Despair.

 

[Chazz6]

Well, the dealer I bought the 275 from was initially totally fine with me returning it, but seems to be changing his tune. I'll give him another day to provide an RMA number and after that I may need some help from the peanut gallery.

I recently ordered and received a preamp from Emotiva. The company offers a 30-day return "if you don’t like your new Emotiva gear for any reason." Unfortunately, it did not sound good in my system. I simply emailed Emotiva, saying that it was a fine product but sounded too bright. No questions were asked and an RMA issued. Emotiva received the return, inspected it for return of all items and for user damage within two days, then promptly credited my credit card.

After Carver Corp. puts out this inexcusable product, if a dealer balks at honoring his return policy and forces a small claims action (no lawyer allowed in California small claims courts), ...

 

[audio2design]

That's a shame Paul. I'd be happy to write a letter for you, as your counsel. [Yes, I'm a lawyer.] I'm new to this forum so I don't know if you can PM me your contact information and I'd be happy to help. You and Amir may have saved a few lives!

One of the problems is solvency. I'm probably off here, but if the company sold 3000 of these amps at the tune of $2600 each that's $7.8M in customer money that needs to be refunded (assuming all customers want a refund). While there may be a legal theory that could trigger insurance coverage, would this type of company (a) have cash to cover a settlement or judgment; (b) would it have insurance limits that high?

I would think the company should just admit it made an error of omission on the ground and offer a retrofit with shipping paid both ways.

As someone who develops products and has to deal with the insurance company, mine would probably tell me to pound salt if I did not have UL, or some equivalent safety certification, or at least documentation of testing equivalent too. I.e. I need to be able to prove I have checked all the boxes to ensure this is a safe product. There was a comment on Audiogon that some of Carver's SS amps had a floating chassis too. That goes from mistake or omission to wilful negligence.

 

[traderitch]

The same is true with SVS and many other audio manufacturers.
Crutchfield has a generous return policy.

One of the Carver dealers that posted in this thread offered to do the same
for units he had sold.

For purposes of discussion:

I am not sure if Emotiva‘s policy prohibits a buyer from opening the case of the product. It’s quite possible that may void their policy. Paul didn’t state whether
his communications with the dealer included his intent.

Be patient

 

[traderitch]

As someone who develops products and has to deal with the insurance company, mine would probably tell me to pound salt if I did not have UL, or some equivalent safety certification, or at least documentation of testing equivalent too. I.e. I need to be able to prove I have checked all the boxes to ensure this is a safe product. There was a comment on Audiogon that some of Carver's SS amps had a floating chassis too. That goes from mistake or omission to wilful negligence.

That is quite a charge you are making (pun intentional)

I am looking at the back of a McIntosh MC275 mk vi and a Aesthetix Atlas and neither of them have the UL or CE designations on their cases.
What is your knowledge of floating chassis designs as it relates to safety?

Be patient