It depends on the kind of preamp your trying to use. Power amps tend to be pretty simple. Plug the guitar into preamp, preamp to power amp, and turn the gain up. Some poweramps have a bunch of different settings, but I just looked at Carvins quickly, and they look to be pretty simple. The preamp is going to be where most of your setup is. I'm sure if you do a search for preamps, you'll find alot of good recommendations for Preamps, unless you already have one.
Jerry, how do those Carvin power amps sound? I'm looking for a good cheap power amp to power monitors in a club, and I've heard good and bad about Carvin. Would you recommend them or not for a live setup?
Thats what my Carvin does now....powers Monitors. I use QSCPLX's for my bass rigs now, but I've used the Carvin in a lot of different situations for over five years now...with no problems/ Knocks on wood
I've owned two Carvin power amps which have both failed on me and destroyed my speaker cabinets in the process. Another friend of mine has two of the newer carvin amps and one of them has failed already. They sound great until they start smoking.
Mine did over three hundred gigs just as a bass poweramp.......I must have gotten very lucky What did they do to blow your speakers?
I have done numerous gigs with my DCM 1500 running it through my Bassrig... it works great and doesn't color the tone at all... It sounds great to me... I like it alot
This sounds about right, IME, but I don't think it's luck. Daniel's UNlucky experience sounds like a rare occurence for these (usually) reliable amps.
My DCM2000 has been bullet proof. It's an older model with the rack handles. I lugged it around in a bass rig for many years and now it's running the side fills at the church where I play. Only changed it out for a QSC PLX due to the weight factor.
I use an Alembic F1X preamp and a DCM1000 in bridged mode. Connect the preamp out to the channel 1 input of the amp. Run the speaker cable from the bridged output of the amp to the speaker input. Plug the bass into the preamp. That's about it. Oh, it's not a bad idea to have the amp zeroed when you first power up. Then adjust your levels.
EVERY TIME!!! Its been my experience that speakers get damaged when you don't start the amp levels at 0, every time you turn it on, and turn it back to 0 before you turn it off.
I've had an R600 head (which has the same power section as the DCM600) for over two years and it's worked fine every time I've plugged it in.
