Has anyone ever seen a Carver GP-1 Preamp?

[wavley]

So as a vintage HiFi fan I often enjoy the work of Bob Carver.  There is a shop in the next town over where the guy gets a lot of great stuff and sells is cheap or barters repair service with my shop, so I get a lot of cool stuff from him.

Recently he scored a BUNCH of Carver stuff from a collector and while I was looking through the rack I found a guitar preamp and amp that I've never seen.  A GP-1 and a GA-250, pretty much all of the info I can find on teh webz is right here... http://mastergaragesale.homestead.com/CarverGuitar.html

So I picked it up, figuring it probably sounds interesting at the very least and has some cool features like multiple effects loops that I could integrate into my rig if I like it.  One of the really cool things is that there are three channels: Clean, Crunch, and Crud.  The two dirty channels have plug in module cards so you can have any combo of the aforementioned channels.  Also, there are transformer isolated DI outs that have built in cab simulation that I haven't tried yet.  I don't have the reverb card, but I'm intrigued by the parallel loop associated with it and I'm thinking about running my 16 Second Delay reissue through it with the dry signal killed because it's true bypass and DSP bypass sound so different.  It seems to be well built and thought out, and other that it's kinda noisy right now probably due mostly to all the very scratchy pots, it actually sounds really good.  I'll take some gut shots tonight.

My only real issue with it so far is that he didn't have the footswitch for it so I'll have to make one.  I have a DB25 plug so that's not an issue, but I haven't had the chance to figure out what pins do what so I can wire it and I haven't found any kind of schematic for it.

[Mark Hammer]

Fascinating.  I had no idea Bob Carver had ever ventured into the instrument amplification area.  Any idea how recent of a product that is?

Should I assume that the removable panel below the XLR jacks provides access to trimpots/dipswitches or some other customizable parameters?

I gather the need for a DB25 connector is because the remote footswitch not only provide channel switching, but also loop-selection for each of the channels.  Any idea if the switching is relay-based or solid-state?

[wavley]

Fascinating.  I had no idea Bob Carver had ever ventured into the instrument amplification area.  Any idea how recent of a product that is?

Should I assume that the removable panel below the XLR jacks provides access to trimpots/dipswitches or some other customizable parameters?

I gather the need for a DB25 connector is because the remote footswitch not only provide channel switching, but also loop-selection for each of the channels.  Any idea if the switching is relay-based or solid-state?

Neither did I, I had seen some Carver Professional stuff before, but they were just power amps.  The manual has a copyright of 1995, so I'm guessing somewhere around there, I really can't find much on it.  That page I linked to (which luckily has a link to the owner's manual), a thread on the carver forum that's actually talking about a Carver Pro amp, and an eBay auction.

About the DB25... so the one in the eBay auction only has a DB15 on the back and doesn't have the 4x10 4x12 labeling for the speaker simulation on the XLR outs (the 1/4" outs are also balanced, which is awesome for me because I run a buffered signal to transformer iso boxes sitting on my amps that I can now run balanced cables to).  You can footswitch the three channels, reverb, stereo loop, EQ, and solo boost from the footswitch.  I imagine there are a bunch of unused pins on that thing.

The panel under the XLRs is actually for a reverb module that for some reason you have to change banks and presets on the module itself, the only control for the reverb is a footswitch to kill the send signal and a level knob.  With no reverb module it's just a stereo parallel effects loop and the reverb knob controls how much is mixed into the stereo buss.

I opened it up last night to have a look around, the Crunch and Crud cards are not surprisingly the same PCB with different values and the sounds are quite usable.  Looking at the block diagram there is a little flexibility about where the mono loop takes it's send, whether the metering is pre or post master volume, and if the cab simulation is on the DI outputs accessible via jumpers, which I forgot to look for last night.

It's a very interesting piece of gear.  Well worth the $100 worth or shop repair credit I paid for it. 

edit: I forgot to confirm the existence of relays last night because I had 8 customers in the shop while I was looking at it, but it looks like that's what they are from the block diagram in the manual and I think I saw them.

[J0K3RX]

Looks interesting... Wondering what it sounds like? 

[wavley]

Looks interesting... Wondering what it sounds like? 

So far I've only run it into a crappy little Ibanez solid state combo we use for a test amp, but it actually sounds quite good.  ALL of the pots are scratchy so it was a little hard to dial in a sound because of dropouts.  If I were running into a solid state amp for the main rig I would probably find the clean channel too clean for my tastes, but I plan on running a lot of pedals in the clean channel loop.  The crunch channel goes from no dirt/warm to a light drive and I find it pretty pleasant for getting nice clean sounds on the lower drive settings, the Crud channel made me think Devi Ever Fuzz when I read the label, but it's actually a nice thick overdrive that had a lot more definition than I thought it would, it probably won't get as much use as my heavily modified English Muffin' or Doomidrive for thick sounds, but I see use for it.

I hope to get a little time to see what the DI outs/speaker simulation sound like this weekend and clean it up a bit.