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Cydrome Leader Cydrome Leader is offline
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Default Thoughts on this little oddity, anyone ...?

Phil Allison wrote:

"Cydrome Leader"

That reminds me- does anybody unnderstood what Carver's "power steering"
was supposed to be or mean in their amps?



** Bob Carver was an expert at coming up with high falutin' names for
various clever dodges he used to save weight and cost.

His " Magnetic Field " amps were nothing of the kind. They simply employed
a triac based voltage regulator in the AC supply to improve the regulation
factor of a ridiculously small iron transformer.


Hmm, was anybody in the 70s not obsessed with triac pre-regulation in all
sorts of power supplies?

In his M400 and PM-2 designs, these puny transformers would emit cracking
noises and *smoke* if you ever bench tested them at rated power for more
than 60 seconds. No thermal shut down was fitted to save the trannies
either.


nice.


From the blurbs on "Power Steering" it applies to 5.1 channel amps and
allows one audio channel to dominate the load on PSU at any given time.
Likely a simple boost inhibit circuit that allows the use of a puny AC
transformer again.


I own an older 5 channel carver amp. I recall upon opening it that the
power supply seemed way small for the alleged rated power across all
channels. The manual said something about this power steering crap, but
the block schematic didn't show anything indicating it was anything other
than "you can overload a channel a little bit before it burns out or the
fuse blows." It seems ok as far as amps in the early surround sound era
were. My DVD+sound setup is straight from 1998 and is this complex mess of
stuff running into a technics decoder and from there there are 5 RCA
cables running to each channel on the carver amp. There's some goofy fiber
link between the DVD player and the technics thing. Prior to this, I had a
stack of multiple stereos running everything. For a crappy action movie
where everything explodes, balance doesn't really matter.

I'm not even sure how you'd do this these days if you didn't get one of
this does everything consumer amps.