I headed across town toward my favorite gym. Stopped at a hilltop intersection, I saw one of the new office towers take the biggest lightning strike I have ever seen. The building, 40-some stories of Gothic Modern topped by a…
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One evening late last summer I took the most expensive workout of my life. In my hurry to meet a friend at the gym, I left the house, leaving my computer and hi-fi on despite the ominous look of the sky. In the South, experience teaches you to dash about disconnecting everything at the first sign of a thunderstorm. Usually I do, but this time my mind was elsewhere.
Had I been desperate and/or gullible enough to be talked into buying a new computer, add $800–$1600. Then figure in the hours of hassling with service people and salesmen. An obvious question at this point is, "Why didn't you make an insurance claim?" The answer is that I had let our policy lapse and had been "too busy" to call our agent. Human oversights and mistakes can combine with natural disasters to yield costly, and sometimes deadly, results.
I had hoped, in researching this article, to produce some "shocking" statistics regarding the dollar value of electronic products damaged or…
Sidebar: More Information
Sources for lightning protection hardware
Delta Lightning Arrestors, Inc., P.O. Box 1084, Big Springs, TX 79721.
PolyPhaser Corp., P.O. Box 9000, Minden, NV 89423-9000.
Cushcraft Corporation, P.O. Box 4680, 48 Perimeter Road, Manchester, NH 03108.
Information sources
Insurance Information Institute.
Edison Electric Institute.
Lightning Protection Institute.
Underwriters Laboratory.
National Fire Protection Association/
Books available at your public library:
All About…
In 1988, Bob Carver set out to design the best amplifier he possibly could, without regard for cost. It was more of an ego exercise than an attempt to build a product with wide commercial appeal. The result was the four-chassis, $17,500 Silver Seven.
Interestingly, Bob Carver chose vacuum tubes to realize his dream of building the ultimate power amplifier. The Silver Seven uses fourteen KT88 output tubes per channel, and puts out 375W into 8 ohms. Bob built three pairs of Silver Sevens, not expecting to sell many at the $17,500 asking price. When those sold quickly, another 10 pairs were…
Sidebar 1: RH's System
The system I used to evaluate the Silver Seven-ts included a VPI HW-19 Jr. turntable with an AudioQuest PT-5 tonearm and Sumiko Boron vdH cartridge, Marantz CD-94 CD player, and an Audio Research SP14 preamplifier. Interconnects were Magnan and Expressive Technologies, both of which made obvious audible improvements in the system. The Silver Seven-ts drove MartinLogan Sequel II loudspeakers and my trusty Vortex Screens through AudioQuest HyperLitz Clear speaker cable. The Martin-Logans were bi-wired, with the woofer polarity reversed to reduce the midbass suckout (…
Sidebar 2: Measurements
The Carver Silver Seven-t was the most powerful amplifier I have ever measured, exercising my dummy-load resistors to their limits. Maximum power output at clipping (1% THD) was a whopping 608.4W into 8 ohms (27.8dBW), and 878W into 4 ohms (26.4dBW). I could not, however, measure the Silver Seven-t's clipping point into 2 ohms because the amplifier became unstable and oscillated when driven even moderately into this low impedance. An input voltage of 50mV (a very low value) caused the amplifier to oscillate when connected to a 2 ohm load. In addition, a spurious…
J. Gordon Holt, October 1990 (Vol.13 No.10):
Editor's note: In this year's January issue (Vol.13 No.1), Robert Harley reviewed the Carver Silver Seven-t monoblock power amplifier and was not impressed with its sound. Yet just one month earlier, in his December 1989 "Final Word" column, Larry Archibald had reported that the Silver Seven-t had produced a good sound when used to drive the midrange/tweeter panels of the Infinity IRS Beta loudspeaker system. In view of this disparity of opinion, I had appended a footnote to RH's January review—"I feel a 'Followup' is definitely in order"—and…
Sidebar 2: New Measurements
Both in order to ascertain whether the samples of the Silver Seven-t that J. Gordon Holt auditioned were ostensibly the same as when Robert Harley had reviewed them, and to see if there were any measured reasons for this disparity between our writers' opinions, I carried out a set of measurements similar to those that Bob had done to support his original review.
The measurements were performed with Stereophile's Audio Precision System One, using high-power resistive loads built by Robert Harley. The distortion vs frequency graphs were made with the SS-…
Sidebar 4: Specifications
Description: Solid-state monoblock power amplifier. Power output: 575W RMS into 8 ohms (27.6dBW), 900W RMS into 4 ohms (26.5dBW), 1000W into 2 ohms (24dBW), specified from 20–20kHz, both channels driven, with less than 0.5% THD (FTC). Frequency response: 3Hz–60kHz, –3dB. S/N ratio: >100dB, A-weighted into 8 ohms. IM distortion: 0.5%. TIM (transient intermodulation distortion): unmeasurable. Input sensitivity: 2.3V RMS. Power consumption: 1400W at full power.
Dimensions: 11.5" (29.2mm) W by 7" (17.8mm) H by 14.5" (36.8mm) D. Weight: 17 lb.
Price: $2000…
Stereophile’s moment-to-moment coverage of the largest audio show in North America is about to begin.
When the 3-day AXPONA, aka Audio Expo North America, opens this Friday, April 12, in Chicago’s spacious Renaissance Schaumburg Hotel & Convention Center, the team of Editor-in-Chief Jim Austin, Technical Editor John Atkinson, Senior Contributing Editor Herb Reichert, and a lowly Contributing Editor with the initials JVS will be posting reports throughout the day and eve on many of the most exciting and noteworthy displays in the show’s 197 active exhibit rooms.
AXPONA’s…