Sunfire Cinema Grand 200 Five 5 Channel Power Amplifier

Carver's new company, Sunfire, and its new Cinema Grand amplifier: The Cinema Grand was designed by Carver to power up multichannel home theater setups. It features 200 watts into 8 ohms per each of its five channels, and 400 watts/channel into four ohms, all continuously driven. And on a time limited basis, it can blast out 800 watts per channel into two ohms. In sum, this black beast puts out anywhere from 1,000 to 4,000 watts! Even more unbelievably, this seemingly bottomless well of power is wrapped up in a cool running, fan-less package weighing a scant 45 pounds. This simple looking brushed aluminum box, with its retro-analog, dimly gold-glowing, "Power Supply Energy" meter (which invariably points to 400 Joules), gives no hint of the tremendous sonic fury it can unleash in an instant. Originally, the Cinema Grand was to have been reviewed by Francis and Gordana as part of a home theater article, but several key components failed to arrive in time. So, the Cinema Grand was just sitting around, looking darkly grumpy for its neglect. But what's this? The instruction manual says it's trivial to transform this multichannel device into a vertically biamped stereo unit? Hmm. Francis 's gears began turning. Vertical Biamping, wherein separate amplifier sections are used for the upper frequency and woofer drivers (using two stereo amps or four monoblocks), is the next step beyond bi-wiring your speakers off a single amp. For best results, all these amps should be identical, although some high end crazies have been known to use tube amps for the mids/tweets, and solid state units for the woofs. Obviously, it's easiest and best if your speaker terminals have two pairs of binding posts to support such a biwiring/biamp rig (and most do.) Biamping the Cinema Grand is ridiculously easy. On the back of the Sunfire there are both balanced (XLR) inputs, and gold-plated RCA jacks. However, there are two RCAs per each unbalanced input into all five channels (ten jacks, total.) So, you just take a front channel's unused RCA jack, and simply loop a short length of interconnect across the amp's back to a rear channel's amplifier input. In this way, the inputs for the left front amplifier channel (powering the left tweeter/upper midrange ribbon) were routed into the left rear channel amplifier (now powering the left speaker's lower mid, and bass ribbon.) This quick procedure was repeated for the right channel. We now had a vertical biamp stereo set up--all within the same amplifier box. Very slick. In the usual five channel home theater amp (assuming you could do this biamp trick), this procedure would be wasteful, as the center channel, and its 200 watts, would go unused. But not so in the Cinema Grand. And why this is so leads us directly into how the Cinema Grand, and its stereo counterpart, the 300 watt/channel Sunfire amp, are so special. At the heart of Carver's amplifiers is something called "Tracking Downconverter." This power topology has some special properties. Its design dates back about fifteen years, when Bob first began thinking about the subject. Despite what you may have read to the contrary, Bob Carver invented this device, and was the first put it to practical, production use (while he was at his former company, Carver Corporation, in its Lightstar amplifier.) See Bob Carver's white paper in 21st on the Tracking Downconverter for a detailed look at how this remarkable device works. The Tracking Downconverter, in conjunction with the Sunfire's common power supply design, dynamically allocates power from any of the five underutilized channels to one that immediately needs it. Thus, in, the biamped Cinema Grand, all the power from the unused center channel can automatically be diverted to any of one the four active stereo channels. The vertically biamped Cinema Grand can therefore output 400 continuous watts per left or right channel into an 8 ohm load, with 200 watts from the unused center on standby reserve. All that having been said, it now becomes very interesting to compare the Cinema Grand with its stereo-only sibling, the Sunfire. The latter costs $2,175, and puts out 300 watts/channel into 8 ohms, or 600 watts, total. But for the extra $200 bucks the Cinema Grand costs, you can get up to 400 more watts at 8 ohms, total (four channels driven, plus unused center), including all the power and control that vertical Biamping provides. Hello? Do we smell a high end bargain here? The Cinema Grand is also easy to system match with tube line stage preamps (our Cary SLP-90L worked super.) It also worked well with passive controllers (the Preeminence Two Line Interface from Reference Line Audio did wonders with the amp.) And as its input sensitivity for rated output is 1.3 volts RMS, you can probably direct drive it off many CD players which have level controls. But an audio bargain is no bargain if it doesn't perform. So, can the biamped Cinema Grand deliver the stereo goods? Let's answer that by first ta

Condition

Used (normal wear)