Bob Carver 180 Mono-blocks perform superbly

One odd thing, Bob Carver always made it quite clear he is not a tube amp person. Who would have guessed.

If you follow vintage tube amp listings on ebay, Bob Carver shows up on occasion with hand built tube amp listings. Some of them have been fairly simple offerings but with unique circuit designs which he describes in detail. Others much more complex and high power. He goes into great detail about the design and construction - even describing how he hand winds the transformers.

The ones I have seen are no reserve auctions that have drawn a great deal of interest and bidding.

Negative feedback, transformers? Ummm, no thanks. I'll stick with my BK Butler designed and built TDB-5150. BK's designs are revolutionary and the build quality is superb.

www.ButlerAudio.com

-RW-

I have owned Parasound JC-1 mono-blocks and still own the Ayon Triton and the Bob Carver 180s in "my system" perform way better than the other gear I have owned. The 180's retail for $7400. They provide a large open, clear and dynamic sound-stage, yet the mids are smooth and liquidity. I'm hearing more detail in familiar recordings with no harshness or grain. You can make out the layers of music in recordings. My friends are blown away by the improvement. The 180's have a circuit that extends the life of the power tubes and the power tubes have a one year warranty. The amps themselves have a seven year warranty and are built like tanks. You can listen in a classic mode or a more contemporary mode by flicking a switch. The new LLC has been set up in Lexington Kentucky and I'm in Louisville so it makes it convenient if repairs were ever needed. All in all I believe Bob has really designed an incredible set of mono-blocks. I love tubes and the 180's are for sure sweet. They normally come in a cherry color but I had mine made in gloss black to match my other components.

12-30-11: Hifihvn
One odd thing, Bob Carver always made it quite clear he is not a tube amp person. Who would have guessed.

Really? Here's an excerpt from a 1990 Stereophile interview:

Atkinson: One of them, of course, was the C19 tube preamp. That's the second tube product we've seen from you, the first being the Silver Seven power amplifier. Does this represent a new-found passion, or have you always been interested in tubes?

Carver: I started designing amplifiers when I was in the 7th grade. Transistors hadn't arrived on the scene, so all my early work was designing vacuum-tube amplifiers. My first passion is vacuum-tube amplifiers, I grew up with vacuum-tube amplifiers. I love vacuum-tube amplifiers, I love them to pieces. I had a fantasy amplifier that I carried around in my mind all of these years; I dreamed about it, on and off, through my military career, through my children being born, through being married. I even purchased some Acrosound A-450 output transformers in the early '60s; I've carried those transformers with me all through my life, waiting some day for the moment to arrive to put them to use. The Silver Seven is that Fantasy Island amplifier, but I never really had the time to do it until now. The basic topology of the circuitry, however, was really hatched years ago.

A secondary reason for the development of the Silver Seven was that I really did want to endow an amplifier with everything that I could possibly think of, or anybody else could possibly think of, that would make it a wonderful, wonderful amplifier. And that included the silver wire and the Wondersolder, the gold connections inside...