Latest Update on the Carver ALS Speakers.
I now have about 100 hours of playing time on the Carver ALS speakers.
To my displeasure they initially exhibited upper treble brightness and a low output level. The upper treble I thought would clear up with more break in time. But the low output concerned me.
I tried everything including moving these tall heavy monsters back and forth in the room for optimum room placement. I had to crank the Ravens nearly to the max to get anything close to my usual high-level setting that I sometimes used with my previous DIY speaker. And, the Carver amp meter was pegging and it blew 4 fuses! (Luckily, I had the forethought to remove my SR blue fuses until everything settles). I thought to myself surely these speakers could not be this inefficient! I was very disappointed.
But, Bob Carver said that he would refund my money if I was not satisfied. So that was reassuring.
I wanted to give them a fair shot,these speakers have been demonstrated many times in large rooms with 30-60 people and the 2015 Audiophile review talks about running these speakers with Carver’s 20-watt tube amps, then why was I getting such a low output with an amp that can output 350 watts? Were they defective? It drove me crazy…
Well, I had an epiphany yesterday morning and remembered that the DEQX manual said something about internal jumpers to increase/decrease the output. So, I took the DEQX apart thinking that a change in the jumper settings may increase the output. Once inside I discovered that the DEQX preamp had some internal output jumpers that were in the wrong place! Instead of being 6 installed in the output jumper spaces there were only 4 and the other 2 were put in the RCA input section. Leaving the output without 2 key jumpers. I will add that I bought this unit used from the Music Room. The previous owner must have moved the jumpers.
It turns out this is also why I had hiss with the Carver amps when I initially turned them on using the balanced outputs from the DEQX with my previous DIY speakers. I thought the hiss was because the Carver amps were not a true balanced design. Using the single ended (RCA) DEQX outputs to the Carver Amps removed the hiss and I thought solved the problem, but I really didn’t understand why. Now I do, there were jumpers missing in the DEQX output section!
Funny though, the DEQX jumper situation didn’t really surface until I got the Carver speakers.
So full circle as the saga goes and once the jumpers were installed in the appropriate positions everything that once sounded like crap now became interesting, exciting and emotional!
I am now very pleased with the sound of the Carver speakers. Whew!
ozzy
