Carvin amps were so underrated. My X100b is still going strong. Bought it new new in 1988 and it still sounds great. Real smooth overdrive and warm clean channels.
I am not trying to say Carvin should try to manufacture amps again, but since they have shut down manufacturing for everything except pedals, they should do limited runs from time to time of their most popular amps, but make them hand wired and charge accordingly like many boutique amp builders
I bought a Belaire about 25 years ago. I have a '73 Fender Dual Showman, and the Carvin can easily match the cleans on the Fender. When I switch to the gain side, with the soak knob set to "3", no pedals, it is pure Rock N Roll heaven ESPECIALLY with a P90
I could listen to Wolf play all day. I had a 1965 Carvin T-151 40 watt solid state guitar amp with reverb and 15" Jensen speaker. It was customized to order. Has a solid black covering. The grill screen included silver thread to give it a sparkle appearance. It sounded amazing.
Have/had the V16 head and 2x12 cab.....the head died after about 2 years of light use (the tubes were still good), and I have very few techs in my area, and for some reason, no one even wanted to look at it..... Not sure what's up with that, but it would definitely keep me from buying another Carvin. If you live somewhere that has amp techs aplenty, maybe you'll have better luck. But, I now have a really cool looking door stop.
Carvin amps had very bad wiring my amp tech was a tech for carvin and told them he been fixing many of these and what the problem was it’s simple fix they wouldn’t listen to him so he refused to work on anymore carvin amps for years I got him to fix my 212 bel air and omg the sound was way better than ever
The newer ones come with Celestion speakers and digital reverb I believe but my older one from the 90s is Carvin GT12 12" 8-ohm speakers and spring reverb.
I just got this amp a few weeks ago and I am trying to figure out why there are two camps, those that think this amp is the best thing since sliced bread, especially the clean channel. And those that think it sounds unspectacular, especially a “muddy” soak channel. And my theory ranges from the volume on the soak does not have a brightness cap, nor a presence control. Or the crowd that doesn’t like it is a British crunch crowd with strong aversion to the under filtered tweed era?
Levi Jesse no I haven’t modded it. It has issues, so it’s been sidelined on the bench. It isn’t a top boost preamp, it does have 4 el84 power tubes but they are fixed bias, not cathode biased like a Vox. So really not a lot of similarities. I don’t believe just having 4 el84 tubes makes it sound like a Vox. Not to mention it is biased heavily into class A/B where as the Vox although a class AB amp is not very efficient in class B
Hmm I might look elsewhere. Thanks for the info. You happen to know any AC30 style sleeper amps? The crate palomino is definitely one of them. Match it with some decent speakers, and possibly a new output transformer and the thing SINGS. However they run incredibly hot...like you can grill on the amp
Levi Jesse you could get the Belair and buy a Vox Pathfinder 15R amp and pipe the pathfinder line out into the effects return of the Belair for a convincing Vox tone. Or get one of the smaller Vox ac4 or AC10 amps. Or get a Vox topboost pedal into the Belair
@@levijessegonzalez3629 Laney VC30 or LC15 can be sleepers, if you can find a good one. UK made generally the way to go - but I have a $350AUD Chinese made clone of a VC30 that sounds amazing (after I spent an extra $450AUD getting it up to spec and modded).
Pros , amp has an amazing clean channel and take pedal like a champ , plenty of power and head room live, looks great very gigable Cons, however I find the soak channel unusable for the most part with out mods, seem to have sheilding issues, no master volume , cant play it past 3 with out blowing everybody off the stage, some times has sudden volume drops, horrible reverb some model have digital and there is no why to tell becuase all the models numbers say the same, I just orderd one on ebay an had all these same issues again! This amp is hit or miss and now the price is way jacked up! but I will say this is the best clean channel I have ever heard, perfer ofer mesa , fender , and also over matchless
