I was having a cold one at my local hangout/ about three blocks from my house. I glanced over at a table and there was my old boss and mentor... Bob Carver!!! I joined Bob and his wife upon his invitation.

Totally blew my mind!

We caught up on old times. He hired me when I was 19... to work with him on a speaker project when he owned Phase Linear Corp.
The speaker we produced was the Andromeda 111 one of the first sub woofer satellite speakers developed. Amazing speakers!!!
Anyways it was amazing to run into the man I consider a true genius after all these years...
He just moved into my hood.

That's cool.

Either you have been making some serious "jack" the past few years or the market crash wiped Bob out ;)

Well, bob has taken a hit with what all his divorces cost him.....

Its a nice restaurant in a high end neighborhood. Its called Magnolia...right where Magnolia Audio Video was born.

He was living about 50 miles north out in the country. So, I was REALLY surprised when I turned around and saw him!!!

And now Bob is building his tube amps and speakers one at a time to order and personally delivering them to the client!

Image search Andromeda 111 without the word speaker in it.

Speaking of "phase" I am guessing it was an issue, not questioning the science, ok I am.

Good competition for the Polks and Infinity of the day.

Cool! Yeah they as you can see were dipole speakers, and required AT LEAST 400 watts a channel. They were happier with about 700 watts. They were pretty cool... very open and holographic sounding with excellent imaging. There is still a following of these speakers over in France where there are a bunch of fans of these speakers.
We had a blast designing them, although they were pretty much a failure, due to the high power requirements, and the weirdness of having a seperate sub-woofer!!! By failure, I think we only produced around 3,000 pair and they were a lot of money back then. Still 3,000 pairs sold, isn't bad.

We were trying to achieve sound similar to the Magnaplanars, but with powerful bass and more detailed highs. The sub woofer used a special EQ --- and had two 12 inch woofers with huge magnets and large voice coils.

Thanks for digging these pics up!H

Correct! Although it looks like Emotiva is trying to buy him out.

Hi Fi Guy...

We worked a long time on the design. The bottom line was to produce a speaker that had amazing soundstaging - openess - imaging and power. Musicality was the keyword. They were / are.

We spent hundreds of hours listening to them, measuring them and tweaking them. We purchased several high end speakers and did comparative listening.
Keep in mind this was in the late 70's!
All in all I'm proud of those weird-assed speakers (thinking outside of the box!) pun-intended!!!


8>)

I still have a Carver Cube Power Amp.....one seriously kick-ass piece of kit, although I haven't used it in at least 10 years.

Teamed up with an RGR pre-amp and a set of Bose 901 MK V's I had one serious sounding system back in 1982!

The 901s were a bit fussy on placement but when located right they used to rattle the windows on the apartment 3 doors down the street!

That amp just produced effortless levels of pure sound :-)

The person that got me started in this industry considered Bob his hero. He had a picture of Bob on his work bench and would tell me stories about the challenges that Bob would take and win, and the time he got to meet Bob. He also owned a good percentage of every amp Bob made including quite a few pro amps, every Sunfire amp model, and even the Carver Lightstar.

I would have LOVED to have been involved with the design and testing in that era.

Hell,I would LOVE to do it TODAY!!

Id work with him again in a heartbeat! His çurrent gig sounds like fun.

Back in the day at Phase Linear we worked three and a half days... they fed us lunch everyday...(350 people)...had free daycare...and at the end of the work week Bob resrrved this huge pizza place / free pizza and beer until we closed the place down!!!
A lot our meetings were fueled by Budweiser... I'll never forget being this timid 19 year old thrust into this corporate business arena with a bunch of employees mostly really old guys (in their late twenties -early thirities!!!) and managers running around holding several meetings in a super high end conference room. Prior to this experience I was running a little retail HI FI operation that I owned and custom building speakers with a friend of mine...Not too much pressure or stress... Then BAM!!! welcome to Phase Linear!!!

One of the first meetings I went to, one of the head guys came in and slaps down a case of beer on the conference table at the start of the meeting...I was sitting there at that table thinking...Hmmmm this just might work out!!!
Crazy fun times.

Currently the ink is drying though on another company sale!

He is working out a deal with Emotiva...