This is my favorite video yet! I love how Chris includes his own autobiography into these discussions. Also, I like the way he calls out marketing BS, while at the same time paying respect to good designs. Great insights and interesting point of view!
How interesting. Even during His early days at 'Phase Linear' - Bob Carver said his amps utilized, "High Voltage Output Swing" ! There is Only One Bob Carver. What a "piece of work" ! ;-)
Im not a huge PS audio fan, because of some of the claims (cables is one ;) ). but Chris Brunhaver, knows his stuff, as well as knowing allot about planar magnetic drivers, something of great interest for me for years. its interesting and joyfull to listen to this dude !
I am a newbie trying to start designing and building my own speakers for a fun side project. I just wanted to say how much I have appreciated these talks, they have helped me tremendously in learning and understanding the small amount I do know now that have made me finally confident enough to try it. Thank you and please keep on doing what you are doing. P.S. when the world settles down I want to come out and tour PS Audio.
Still have my M400 cube amp and companion c4000 pre amp from 1980. Just upgraded amp, but cant part with the many features of the pre amp.Recapped in 2021. Bobs partner Frank recommend a Carver authorized service shop. Frank, nice old guy and a character too. Got me a break on service cost since I was an early years Carver customer.
Part of the trick was that the passive radiator had something like a 2 kg Mass attached to it and the purpose of that was to bring the resonance down in the range that Bob wanted it to operate at.
I still have and use my Sunfire sub I purchased 20+ years ago. It still puts out incredible base! I think Bobs real gift was not only having a deep understanding of how to make great sound with out of the box thinking. But also understanding that you have to simplify your sales pitch so that consumers have something to grasp on to so they understand that his products did things in a different way without going in to crazy engineering speak that drives people crazy. Yes you have some consumers 5hat want to dig in to the technical detail but that’s not the mainstream.
@@marcus1970 😁. Hey - there still out there and sometimes you can pick them up for a song. I have had mine repaired for $250 but it was well worth it. I have seen some that had the weight that sits in the passive radiator come loose but its all repairable. on a side note, I really expected the surround to deteriorate over time but so far that hasn't happened.
This subwoofer is still part of my system that includes Maggie 3.6 R's. It sits on a Symposium anti-vibration platform which is on Carpet so there is no walking around. I am also in fear of my life to turn the volume up even a little bit. I believe it integrates fine in my system but I never A/B'd it against say a REL So I would tend not to comment on it's ranking put up against some of the best. I owned a Phase Linear amp and preamp in the early days of my audio awakening and they sounded pretty cool in the '70's driving Dalquist DQ 10's. IMHO Carver is a freaking genius. Always comes up with design ideas that seem to draw people in sort of like PSA (P 300) and other epiphanies but somewhat more off-the-wall. He was never afraid to go against the grain with his unique ideas. We need more designers like Bob Carver if not for anything else but creating a buzz in the industry
@Fat Rat I have a sense for the melodramatic. That was stupid but almost true. Sometimes I do adjust the subwoofer to the recording and then I play something else with a huge amount of bass and forget to adjust the volume down… Oh boy! This is happened to me several times. That's why it's best to set the subwoofer up once and leave it alone.
@Fat Rat you're totally right. If you allow yourself to have an open mind when you communicate with other people I think that both of us can agree with the other persons point because we use common sense. Living in South Florida with the nature that I do not like is very difficult for me. Most people who live down here do not understand that. I think I already told you that I like the change of seasons so this is especially difficult for me to ever acclimate to. But it's probably where I'm going to remain due to my financial situation and that I still have a job with one of my childhood friends. I was rambling but the point I'm trying to make is That south Florida is a place that is not for thinking people.
I had a carver magnetic cube amp (250 watts per channel), in my system in the mid 1980s. I was always amazed at what that was able to produce. I it strapped into the 500 watt mode driving my Acoustat sub-woofer. Real nice. That amp is still running to this day. My son has it up in VT and he says it still really rocks! I didn't know they also made a cube sub-woofer. Wish I had.
I can sill recall the Cerwin-Vega speakers we installed in the neighborhood theatre for the movie "Earth Quake" . They literally shook the building. In fact, the local 2,000 seat movie palace theatre was not allowed to play the film as it would have damaged the decorative plaster in the ceiling.
Back in my DJ-ing days I used a Carver PM-1.5 in a custom box with a mixer above it. Used it to drive some JBL keyboard speakers for weddings and such. Loved that rig. Never knew Carver made speakers until I ran across a “take it all” ad on CL. All I wanted was the TFM-55x but it also came with the AL-III plus speakers plus some other goodies. They sounded great, but my Maggie 1.7is were a bit nicer, if thinner on the bottom end. And lighter, easier tucking away. So the Carvers got sold on. Hoping to find a deal on a Sunfire sub, and in the meanwhile am saving pennies toward a REL or something similar
Bob Carver is easily one of the smartest men in Hi-Fi, but he's also very PT Barnum-esque. The Sunfire True Subwoofer came out in the 90s, it truly was revolutionary.
I inherited a carver signature subwoofer from a friend who picked it up and the recycling center in a ritzytown. The thing works perfectly and the owner was moving to Texas and had no time to sell it so he just put it on the table at the recycling center. I have it in my studio but I can say that the bass although the quantity is pretty impressive for the size, the quality is not musical at all.
Paul/Chris--further to the lawsuits, reputedly Mirage was working on a flagship om1 loudspeaker in the late 90s and it was to have a detachable sub with an umbilical cord to the main body of the speaker so that if desired you could separate the compact and powerful sub and move it to a place in the room generating less nodes, etc. It was rumored that at a show Bob walked into the mirage room, took a look, and tried to walk out of the room with the sub for 'evidence'. And then the cord snapped back or something. Chaos ensued. Only in this business.
Remember it was released in the 90s. The Sunfire sub was such a spectacle, no customer cared about any of Bob Carver's claims. Even non-audio enthusiasts were mesmerized with this small tiny cube shaking the room. The competing subwoofers were Definitive Technology and Velodyne, known for their "No Replacement for Displacement" style subwoofers. Demonstrating it to customers was like performing a parlor trick.
Been a long time fan of Bob Carver, came out with some great amplifiers , I remember him telling the story when he first started out. Going to a McIntosh clinic to get a print out of his amplifier specs. He used a coffee can for the chassis. At first they didn't want to test it, but they finally did and it produced 350 watts a channel. That became the Phase linear 700. The rest is history.
Sunfire truesub... Trialed one at home for months!... about 1997 ish...... The output WAS prodigious .. and considering its size.. Just plain crazy. ... Ultimately I decided a Linn 5150 sub had the edge on speed and integration.. But even with two 12" in isobarik configuration... It could not destroy the house foundations as I feared the Truesub would!
Bob was certainty big and marketing claims with his products. I remember playing with one of those true subs on Harwood floors with some marten Logan speakers and I can confirm those put out bass and loved to martch across that floor. Almost purchased one of those back in the day.Have seen a few reconditioned ones pop up for sale on ebay. Demoed one of his 5 channel sunfire amps as well. Remember playing with this sunfire prepro that had that sonic holography button. If I remember it didn't seem to do much. I also remember Demoing a pair of genesis amp 1 speakers with the built in subs along with Bob carvers older lightning preamp and power amp. That system sound ok but too much for the room. Still to this day I have never heard bass like in those older genesis speakers. Those old genesis subs were terrific! Thanks!
The solution to the Sunfire subs walking is SVS’s subwoofer isolation system $49. I use a pair of True Subwoofer Jr.s with Maggie 3.7i’s. They are crossed over at 35 hz using the high level inputs all driven by Bob Carver Crimson 350s. It does not sound half bad.
You guys don’t always speak in unreservedly glowing terms about Bob Carver, but you sure do talk about him a LOT in your videos. That tells me something.
A great little sub for home theater with great impact. Not so good in the context of a 2 channel audio system. I owned a couple of them back in the day. The downside was that these little cubes had a very high failure rate which turned a lot people off.
The best model for analyzing and understanding the mechanical behavior of all woofer/enclosure systems IMO is Newton's Second Law of Motion applied to forced oscillation. This needs to be integrated with the electrical performance and the two are interdependent. One problem is back EMF. This is created by the potential energy due to the woofer's excursion against its restraining force being converted back into electrical energy where the woofer converting it into kinetic energy acts like a generator as well, instead of being only a linear motor. As the voice coil moves through the magnetic lines of flux a voltage is induced in the coil. I think this causes the woofer to likely oscillate around its mechanical resonant frequency. The choice of woofer inductance and magnetic field strength can work both for and against the designer. I had this discussion with Ken Kantor on line many years ago. Somewhere I think in one of his postings in Classic Speaker Pages he posted his electrical schematic model of a woofer but it didn't include the back EMF generator. So we disagreed about that. My favorite design is still the optimized acoustic suspension design Edgar Villchur invented. Three parameters govern the tuning of the system, moving mass, damping factor, and spring constant. One reason I like the acoustic suspension model is that this is the only design I know of where the damping factor and spring constant are not frequency or amplitude dependent. Therefore you could in principle tune a driver of any size to have any frequency response you want it to have. At frequencies above the woofer things get more complicated due to acoustics but the same principles apply. Roy Allison's work on coupling the woofer output into the room and eliminating the 200 hz suckout also was a valuable contribution and was used in both his brand and some of AR's TOTL later designs. Another reason I like it is that the restoring force being mostly the difference in air pressure on opposite sides of the cone is applied uniformly over its entire surface. This greatly reduces circumferential and radial differences in force mechanical suspensions create which tend to twist and shear the cone into harmonic breakup modes.
Fundamental error: The fact that a woofer has an impedance peak (or two) does NOT mean the amplifier needs to produce "lots of voltage" around those frequencies! The impedance peaks are at resonance, where the speaker also has an *efficiency* peak, so the voltage does not need to go up. In fact, I had to EQ my woofers *down* at resonance (-24dB, because it also coincides with a room resonance), in order to achieve reasonably flat response in the room, so my amp is putting out *much less* voltage at the impedance peak.
@@cbrunhaver Resonant frequency goes up to about 90Hz and then as frequency decreases below ~70Hz, the power requirement grows to impractical levels. But why do something that destroys the performance? It's like mounting 145SR13 radial tires on a Corvette C8.
A friend just gifted me an Carver c1000 5ch receiver. No sound. I know its just a surround receiver, but it's got a 200wpc rating and from what I've gathered those power ratings are true. I would really love to hear it for 2ch. I took it in to my stereo guy and he said the main board is cooked. I think I could buy one for the price of fixing it. I've only heard Carver HiFi a couple of times in my life, my uncle and his buddies were all into systems in the 70s and 80s when I was a kid, so I saw some cool stuff. I was always interested in Carver stuff because it was pretty rare to see in my area growing up (Flint, MI). From every thing I've gathered about Bob Carver he's had quite an interesting story.
Chris is wrong about the tracking down converter power supply ,as it can put out both high voltage and current at the same time .It tracks the input signal and keeps the voltage rails at just 6 volts above what is needed at that instant in time ,therefore there are only 6v across each 20 Amp output transistor which helps them rum cool with only the chassis as a heat-sink and always able to deliver 20 amps from each transistor (he uses up to 18 of them) regardless of the voltage.. Anyone interested in a more in depth explanation read his white paper here .thecarversite.com/yetanotherforum/userfiles/Sunfire_Amplifier_Whitepaper.pdf
@Fat Rat It takes a lot more R&D budget to design and engineer a great servo subwoofer. But Paul has an excellent combination of engineering skills to tap into that could make it possible, and in my humble opinion, it would be much better money spent than doing yet another iteration of their FPGA based DAC that hardly can compete with DACs costing much less involving chipsets from AKM and ESS. Now listening to music late evening with my planar magnetic Sundara headphones connected to a BTR5 DAC costing TWO PERCENT of the direct stream DAC and in my A/B testing, sounding at least as good, seriously speaking. Yes, the BTR5 can also do DSD256. And it has a nice EQ fixing my hearing loss above 12kHz. DACs are not a good place to spend a lot of money nowadays. A well-designed American-made subwoofer is!
Mostly kidding and being funny here: Does Chris remind anyone of Buffalo Bill? Chris rubbing lotion on a subwoofer in the basement “play bass as youre told”
A lot of left handed complements !!! Was the woofer good or bad??? Yes or No ???? Carver is a genius....if not always mainstream.....I still use his sonic holography unit today. Too much snobbery in the "stereo-hi fi" business. Irving M. Fried (IMF speakers) was also a pioneer stereo genius that was mocked for his "personality" not for his products (mainly transmission line speakers).
The problem with Carver is that he always spun the technical details of his products. There was no need for such shenanigans. They [the various products] did what they did, and many customers were happy with them. But there's no need to obfuscate/lie.
@@thunderpooch Can't believe you just called Carver a liar !?!?!?!? Is he anymore a liar than the hundreds of HiFi companies who touted their "peak power" stats instead of RMS ??? or even if they used RMS stats...they were + or _ 10% or such???? Rating you bass response in 15 different ways, etc. I've been following these companies for 50+ years, and they're have always been a multitude of ways to represent their products in unorthodox, or misleading ways.....mainly because of no set technical standards. To single Carver out as some outlier is ridiculous and repulsive. He is an innovator, and a "rebel" in this world of snobs, and if it wasn't for people like him, Fried, Arnie Nudell, and others.....we'd all still be using Sansui speakers, and Layfayette, or Radio Shack electronics.
@@stevec.6119 Fantastic, he's an innovator and also a liar, just like the other nameless people in the audio business who bullshit and knowingly twist the facts. Give it a rest. Quit making excuses for Carver. Being a skilled engineer and innovator doesn't earn him lifetime immunity -- or even posthumous immunity -- from criticism when his rhetoric was often full of BS (lies). Maybe it is par for the course, since the audio scene doesn't have the best standards. I'm not a Carver hater and don't think he deserves the 8th ring of hell, or anything approaching such vitriol. But face the obvious, he knowingly lied because he thought there were more sales to be had by fooling people into believing untrue claims.
@@thunderpooch Haters like you are what gives message boards a bad name......I surely hope you aren't the miserable human being you appear to be, judging by your vitriolic posts. there actually might be a place for YOU int the "8th ring" (as you so eloquently stated) of hell. Quit attacking people who post things differently from your beliefs, and contain yourself to questions and answers directed at the moderators themselves. Enough is enough.
My guess is BC had a PhD in marketing hype nad design aesthetics. I was the proud owner of one of his sloppy subs, a C2 preamp, and 1.5t amp with 900wpc peak dynamic headroom. But 10 years later I discovered that aesthetically pleasing powerhouse of an amp couldn't even match the power and authority of an Onkyo 80wpc receiver. But the gear looked really nice and I enjoyed his Sonic Holography. Overall I thought BC equipment was extremely mediocre with engenius (think no morals) hyped marketing strategy. I was robbed of years of musical enjoyment due to my naivete while BC was living a pretty good life and expanding his company. This type of reputation is nothing to be proud of nor is it funny. It used to be that selling snake oil was actionable in a court of law. Regrettably it has become an acceptable way of life for far too many. As the story goes, an uneducated man walks up to a fruit cart and he'll steal a couple of bananas and apples. Now give that man an education and he'll find a way to steal the entire cart and horse too. In my opinion, not cool at all.
