i went ahead and picked up the one i was looking at. labor day mon. will make 3 weeks that i've had it. after i went and looked at it, and listened to some familiar music that i took with me, i decided to get it.
cosmetically, it's perfect. he took very good care of it. you can tell. of course most people will take good care of a nice piece like this.
it does need some bench time, however. luckily, i've already got somebody in mind (who has worked on other carver gear before). so now i'm looking at deciding on replacement caps, and a couple of other odds and ends.
i think the main reason the guy who sold it let it go was that he didn't know who might be able to fix it. he probably didn't know a repair tech, or somebody still doing electronics repair. so, he wanted to get what he could out of it, while he could.
this piece does have a couple of areas that need attention. the balance control for the left side is fine, but on the right side you are limited by how much signal you can hear before the signal begins to distort. and the watt meters show this. the right meter only indicates about half of what the left channel is indicating. still, though you can get a satisfactory balance between left and right when listening through headphones, but where this discrepancy really shows is when you connect speakers. then it seems, you're only able to hear the left channel only, with very little coming out of the right channel.
one other thing is the "cd direct" switch. when you try to engage this, then all signal is lost. so, you're unable to hear how this piece sounds perfectly flat, without the tone controls being engaged.
right now, i have the cdp plugged into the "video 2/aux" input on the amp.
when i was talking to the guy who was selling it about these flaws he said that if i could find somebody qualified to bring the amp back up to spec, then i would probably have a fine piece that i would get a lot of enjoyment out of. so, now comes phase two: getting these minor flaws addressed, and hopefully everything will go well during the repair and restoration.
during the audition a few weeks ago, you could tell that this is a fine-sounding amplifier. refined sounding. a bit neutral, yes. a bit "recessed-sounding", (dare i say, "a bit tube-like"), but with solid-state impact (but not too much impact, if you know what i mean). the bass is what i would consider "controlled" and "focused". i've always hated the term "tight bass", because usually when someone says the bass is "very tight", that usually means very little if any bass impact. but this amp has impactful bass (if that's how the recording was mixed, then you'll hear it through this amp). but, the bass isn't "bloated", or over-stated. to me, the bass presentation is getting very close to "just right."
no piece of equipment is perfect (not through all the frequency spectrum, or across different genres of music), but considering how this amp sounds from the low freq.'s to the mid-range presentation, and how it delivers the highs, i'm very impressed with how musical this amp sounds. i like the way it was engineered to sound this way.
if everything works out once it goes to the shop, then it'll be my "go to" amp. all things considered, i thought it was worth taking a chance on.
but, like they say: "you pays your money/you takes your chances." here's hoping. but, we'll see.
