caf (01/08/83)
I have had an M-400 for about a year now and have yet to trip any circuit breakers with it. It is plugged into the switched outlet on the Carver preamp, which in turn is plugged into a switched plug strip. A lamp plugged into the same strip does indeed dim when there is a 200 watt boom of a bass drum, but I haven't felt a strong need to do anything about it yet. The 200 watts per channel has been adequate so far, even for DBX records made from digital sources. The SCR spower supply will activate any ground loops you may have in your system. Since my system includes a Laser videodisc player, VCR's, Kloss Projection TV, and a Tektronix TV Waveform Analyizer, it has been impossible to eliminate the ground loop unless I disconnect the Waveform Analyizer. Unless wires are carefully routed, AM reception can be noisy due the SCR power supply. I notice that the recent Heathkit amp has a powerline relay which would seem to avoid some of the high current switching problems. The protection circuit (Carver calls it an analog computer) has, I suspect, saved me several hundred dollars' worth of blown speakers. I would not trust myself without such protection as "Murphy's Law" applies strongly to complicated stereo connections. (Over the last few decades I have zapped many a speaker/driver with much less powerful ampilifiers!) Chuck Forsberg cdi!caf