Yes. Called it the transfer function. I had the 250 wpc version til a break in , it was my first really nice amp.
I think he dirtied it up to sound like a Mark Levinson, then like a Conrad Johnson.
What a shame. People believe you get proportional to money spent. Poor sense of values, and this poor sense is widely advocated. You get what you understand, nothing more, nothing less. People believed because those amps cost more, they must sound better. So much so that they broke their "rule" Sad, funny, weird, sad, strange...no, I will stick with sad. )-: But wait, its Funny. (-:
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So it's your opinion that in 1995 a carver amp wasn't better than the jvc receiver and ancient BGW power amp combo it replaced through an insurance claim?
For one who espouses straight wire with gain, your reasoning appears weird.
That carver had vastly better thd figures to go along with better IM distortion ratings, as well as a better slew rate than the BGW amp.
With the hearing losses I've acquired at the top of treble these days, the original combo might be okay for me now, but back then the metal dome tweeters most manufacturers flogged sounded completely wretched to me on anything I could fit in that claim besides the carver.
And my insurance company locked me in to two brands of speakers who exclusively used metal domes.
So no, I disagree it's sad to make a choice on amps that play the available choices of speakers acceptably.
The Unadulterated Carvers would be a better choice over the Adulterated Carvers. I think I would take all the Carvers over the OLD BGWs or most old JVC. The screwed up Carvers probably still had enough Moxy to take those on. but give me the clean ones instead, if you don't mind. A cheap QSC of today, of course, would brain all of the above, as would a lot of others now. Power amps are power amps. Behringer. Yamaha, Crest, even these pro amps are in the straight wire with high current game. Money best spent on converters and speakers.
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I agree speakers and room are big distorters in playback, and am happy with digital conversion via a tascam cd recorder, and or an inexpensive non oversampling DAC.
But aren't the specs all pretty good on digital these days?
Signal to noise and frequency response all seem excellent, if I didn't want movies on my big system sometimes, I wouldn't even have added the DAC.
Is there a published spec one should reference for DACs?
Believe it or not you can still get a bad DAC, one bad enough to pick out of a DB test with a bit of trainng.
Safest route now is to forgo all built in DACS, get External Lavry, Benchmark, Lynx, Some of the Pro cards, emu, rme. A few of the top top gamer cards too from creative asus but you had best know how to negotiate those bloated drivers. Best bet? Schiit Audio, even tbe Modi sounds great. Look out fot bad DAs built into players and receivers, many are poor.
Safest route now is to forgo all built in DACS, get External Lavry, Benchmark, Lynx, Some of the Pro cards, emu, rme. A few of the top top gamer cards too from creative asus but you had best know how to negotiate those bloated drivers. Best bet? Schiit Audio, even tbe Modi sounds great. Look out fot bad DAs built into players and receivers, many are poor.
I think that you guys still have it a bit wrong:
Carver did NOT believe that much was important, including crossover distortion which he allowed. However, when he compared his solid state amp to a good tube amp, a difference was noted, but when he modified the solid state amp by changing some characteristics like frequency response and damping factor, it became almost impossible to tell the difference in a blind listening test. That is normal for ABX as well. However, long term listening will show that the solid state amp had certain problems that more expensive amps might not have, but it takes more time to resolve the differences.
Just remember, Bob Carver is NOW making expensive tube amps for the public. Why doesn't he just retire?
Carver did NOT believe that much was important, including crossover distortion which he allowed. However, when he compared his solid state amp to a good tube amp, a difference was noted, but when he modified the solid state amp by changing some characteristics like frequency response and damping factor, it became almost impossible to tell the difference in a blind listening test. That is normal for ABX as well. However, long term listening will show that the solid state amp had certain problems that more expensive amps might not have, but it takes more time to resolve the differences.
Just remember, Bob Carver is NOW making expensive tube amps for the public. Why doesn't he just retire?
But you didn't participate, and the characters that did were on your side as subjectivist as can be. They also listened on their terms and at their leisure IIRC.
Subjectivist is fine. Peeking and preconceptions instead of ears-only is more questionable.
An appreciable series resistance in the speaker wires interacts with the speaker's crossover network. This causes the frequency response at the speaker terminals to resemble the impedance curve of the speaker to some degree. This is worst for speakers with highly reactive input impedance.
There probably is a small degree of tracking, but my three ways are discreetly amped and actively crossed over now.
So far , I'm only hearing benefits, some of this no doubt due to not being stellar at passive networks.
There can be as much as several dB of error with tube amps. This is one of the advantages of active crossovers, no impedance between the speaker and amp.
Running subjective tests also involves setting up preconceptions in people's minds - I get the impression that most involve questions like, "Which do you prefer?", implying you should like what you're hearing. My approach would be to say, "Both examples you're going to hear are defective, which one has the most disturbing, irritating defects?". One's mental approach is then very different, and one is much more likely to pick up the issues which are the long term listening problems ...
I agree, fas42. I listen mostly for two things: irritability, and lack of information conveyed.
What, peeking and preconceptions? That's OK, pretty obvious this will never go anywhere.
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