Carvin Vintage Amps

[rathurosamal]

I have a carvin x100b head - they have beautiful sounds, but dont expect to get the new metal kinda sounds out of them - they have the 80's sound! i tried a marshall amp, then directly into the carvin, and the clean channel is what won me over! it takes awhile to get your sound, but it CAN be done... good luck

[hasserl]

Note that the Carvin X series amps use an active tone control circuit, small adjustments to the controls equal large changes in tone. Make your adjustments carefully and in small increments. Try to operate it like a common FM stack and you wont like it at all, but use it correctly and you can dial in some good tones. Steve Vai and Frank Zappa did well with them, as did Craig Chaquico and others.

[tedmich]

Carvin Nu Metal = V3

Vai's Blue Powder was on a X100B supposedly

can't forget the infamous Carvin Quad X pre, 11 tube gain stages!

[Gtr_tech]

The Quad-X is a crap design IMO. I really don't understand the appeal.....absolute mush machines. I have one but I went through it and changed ch 3-4 to 3 and 4 stages. The low V plate supply was ditched in favor of a real world 300v supply via a seperate xfmr. Its nice sounding now aside from a low level hum I can't seem to track down.

[tedmich]

I agree, it was a silly design; many wasted tubes