Carver 6200 Manual

[Bette Keesee]

Hithere. First post on the forum. I've got an issue with my 6200 and was looking for some troubleshooting tips. I've had the amp for a few months and the phono preamp works just fine with my turntable. I recently added a cassette deck and CD player and found that all the other inputs (CD, Aux, etc.) do not work. I use the tape out (RCA to 3.5mm) with a small headphone tube amp and that also works fine. Has anyone encountered this or a similar situation before? Anyone have any tips or advice they could share? Thanks in advance for your assistance!

@pbzka Welcome to the site. We've got a lot of free info on Carver equipment, but only have the service manual for the 6200. There is an owners manual for the 6250 which is likely similar to the 6200.

The first step in troubleshooting your receiver is to determine the full extent of the problems. Does the tuner work? Do the audio connections for video work? It's odd that the phono would work fine with the other audio inputs not working. Does the remote work at all (if there is one)?

Often when all the inputs stop working you will find the tape switch is in the wrong position. Judging from the 6250 manual, the tape switch must be pointed UP to allow the phono/tuner/CD/Aux/Video inputs to function. I know, your phono works fine, but did you move any switches during your test?

Once the full extent of the problems are determined and cockpit error is eliminated you have a very challenging job. The 6200 appears to use solid state switching to switch among inputs. Do you have the skills and test equipment to trouble shoot this? Once you get past opening the cover and looking for burned components, you will need a multi meter, oscilloscope and a test signal generator to narrow down exactly where the failure might be. You will also need electronic skills, patience and good eye sight to read the schematics in the service manual. Receivers are a tough place to start your Carver trouble shooting education, so you might want to consider sending it to a professional for repair/restoration. That receiver is over 30 years old and may be suffering from a variety of age related issues.

Took a look at the service manual and I must say they did a decent job at labeling some of the jumper ribbons with its respective signal. This in itself helps to identify the particular signal path you are following, or at least it gets you started.

Thanks to everyone for your advice. I think it may be a bad tape monitor switch as the LED does not illuminate when the switch is on. I will take your advice and search the forums for 6200 troubleshooting tips. Thanks again!

I really like this thing, found it FOR FREE in a TV throwaway bin at my town dump! And it works, too, but I'd like to find a manual for it and it isn't even listed as a model anywhere that I can find, even on THIS site.

We have the SERVICE manual in our Manuals Library (menu at the top of the home page of this site). Many of the Carver Receivers have similar operation, so another operator's manual may give you good guidance. Or, if you find one on Ebay, please consider scanning it and sharing it here, so the library becomes more complete.

Just looking quickly, the 6250 manual, here: Carver MXR-6250 owner manual.pdf (thecarversite.com) seems to be very similar. The big (observable) difference between the 6200 and the 6250 is that the 6200 has only BASS and TREBLE control pots on the faceplate. While the 6250 has BASS, MIDRANGE and TREBBLE controls. There could be others - I only took a cursory look.

You can find more info via Google, too. Try googling this string of keywords: "Carver 6200 Receiver" A Bunch of links pop, including threads here, on this forum, and on Audio Karma, and few Youtube Videos.

Thanks, RobertR! THAT was the info I suspected and wanted confirmation of. I looked in the Manuals library here, and apparently completely glossed over the MXR-entries, because my unit does not "say" "MXR". 6200 service manual is a good start, though.

My next question will be about those output meters, but let me formulate those thoughts first, after hooking it up to a REAL source and set of speakers. I only tested it on the bench with a set of cheezy re-purposed auto box speakers.

I can confirm that my Receiver 2000 does not appear to have any markings on it that say MXR 2000. And for over 30 years I have thought of it as a a MXR 2000 and have been dissiminating false information.

i personally use a carver professional ZR1000 digital amp with my KLF-30's (no connection with bob carver)..... great sound and power - much smoother than any other ss amp i've ever tried and yet with all the power that is lacking in some tube amps....

That is a very open question. I am not familiar with that model. I have a Carver M1.0 that is 200 wpc or 1000w mono. This is very powerful and clear. However, you will find that the sound will be very "harsh" on a horn speaker. I've hooked the carver up to my la scalas and the result was disappointing.

From a previous post: Every time the name Carver appears, I just have to take a poke. There are many solid-state amps that I feel are not a good match for the super-sensitive (95 dB/w/m or more) models of Klipsch and other horn drivers. Carver is one. What he has done with class D amplifiers and small powered sub-woofers is remarkable, but his older, traditional style amps are not a good match to horns:

Two decades ago, I lived with a blue-gray solid-state Carver (M1.5t?) amp capable of 750-watt peaks per channel. It was capable of sustaining 350 watts RMS into an 8 ohm load with no more than 0.5% total harmonic distortion from 20 to 20,000 Hz. It pushed 600 watts per channel RMS into 8 ohms for musically significant periods. As for the power supply, the M1.5t is regulated to charge the output stages for a brief maximum of 1200 watts. The manual warns proceed gingerly in experimenting with the joyous undistorted sound levels the M-1.5t can drive them to. Amounts of on the order available here can easily - unseat woofer voice coils, damage cone suspensions, char or fuse tweeter voice coils and even demagnetize driver motors..."!

The Carver units drove my super-sensitive walnut-oiled Cornwall 1s, with their B2 crossovers, like a diesel engine on a go-cart. Lots of raw power. Every once in awhile, we would tempt fate and turn up the volume in my small 100 year old New England home. The live cannon shots on Telarcs 1812 Overture smacked the floor, tickled the toes, raised dust, rattled windows, impressed teenagers and created a tsunami sound wave big enough to flatten Tokyo. You could feel it all right. Even with out a sub woofer, my Cornwalls had no problems with this unusual musical piece.

The combination of the two components however did not make music. At the low power levels that sensitive horns require, the Carver had copious amounts of THD. Carver's amps are NOT a good sounding or practical spending match with sensitive horns. I think those models were precursors to the class D and H amplifiers that power subwoofers today. The advent of the class was birthplace of powered sub-woofers. Nobody is running around saying that class D or H amps are smooth enough to drive sensitive speakers.

I too, was very impressed with Carver amps with JBL monitors and Magnepan planar loudspeakers, but as soon as I hooked up my Cornwalls, I was soon looking for other means of amplification (and found it with McIntosh SS amps and later with my 300B SET).

For many years I enjoyed up to three M-400t cube amps and a newer TFM-35x, and except for one used M-400t I won on eBay that later bit the dust, all my Carver components operated and sounded flawlessly! Both my previous JBL L112 Century II monitors and Magnepan MGLR1 planars sounded great through my Carver equipment...maybe due to these loudspeakers not being very sensitive, I don't know. But when driving my super-efficient Cornwalls, the Carver amps sounded harsh and thin; not very life-like at all.

Carver's components of the '80s were always considered mid-fi at best (what a shame...I always considered them better than that). Since they're not the most musical sounding components with Klipsch loudspeakers IMO, I would pretty much look elsewhere for your amplification needs.

halcro is not a digital amp. the schematics are hard to understand but it is really a "normal" SS (MOSFET) amp with some very advanced thinking in PS filtering, distortion canceling and feedback application. tony

I forgot about the hiss. That was one thing that got in the way of an otherwise good sound. I did hear that on the one amp we had here, and is an important reason why the former owner (actually he still has the amp) is now using the very quiet SE OTL from Transcendent Sound. Actually, right now he's using the amps I made, and I'm using the OTL.

Also: I just wanted to share that I just now finished building the Dope From Hope minibox to use for a dedicated center channel using one Heresy and one of my Moondogs. I've very curious to hear this!

I've tried a number of Carver amps (and a "Digital Time Lens" for CD) over the years, going all the way back to the legendary Phase Linear 400. Never liked any of them. I once had a trio of his M1.5t amps in my system which were supposed to sound "tube-like". They were used for no more than 10 minutes before I took them back to the dealer. His "Magnetic Field Amplifier" was a joke. A fine example for Julian Hirsch on how "all amplifiers do not sound the same". He even admited in one of the old hi-fi rags regarding one of designs that he didn't patent the "novel circuit", only the circuit protection scheme, because it wasn't worth anything without the circuit protection. I found all of his designs NOISY. They aren't the most reliable products on the market (regardless of price). And what's worse is that the Journal Of The Audio Engineering Society actually allowed PWK to publish a very tongue-in-cheek article, "The Ultimate LSH Loudspeaker" (reprinted in the Klipsch Dope From Hope newsletters), basically slamming Bob Carver regarding a very stupid statement he made in Audio Magazine (Feb. 1972) ("Whenever a loudspeaker engineer makes an attempt to extend or smooth out the frequency response of design, or to lower distortion, the laws of physics demand that the loudspeaker become ever less efficient.")

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