Question for Carvin R600 owner/operators!!!!!

Are you running it off of just one power amp,or in bridge mode? If you're just using one power amp and using the cab as a stand alone, you may be under powering the cab. The Carvin cab can handle alot of power. I doubt you are over heating your amp, so it probably dosen't matter if you leave it on or shut it off during breaks. I could be wrong about that, but I do use a series II R600 amp and have never had any problems.

 

You don't give alot of specifics...but, there could be several things going on...

1) you could just be over-driving the speakers and the paper cones could be getting fatigued. Each time you setup they sound fine but get worse as you keep overdriving them and eventually they'll blow.

2) Have you noticed that it has been humid lately or that the environment you have been playing in recently is humid? Speakers will distort in a humid environment and the longer you play them in this environment the more they distort.

3) Check your gain versus your volume and make sure your gain is not higher than your volume.

4) Check your alcohol content. The more alcohol a person consumes (especially beer or wine) the quicker and more easily your ear becomes fatigued and you may be turning it up slightly (or playing harder which will give a distorted kind of sound) to compensate for it, thus pushing your speakers harder as the night goes on.

Then again, I could be wrong.

 

If you don't resolve the problem, call Carvin's service department and talk to them about it, or post at the Carvin bbs and try to get one of the mods to help.

 

It's not always the best idea to boost *everything* on an EQ. I'd suggest bringing all your sliders down together, preserving their relation to each other, so that most of them are at or near 0 but the frequencies you wanted to boost are still boosted. Then bring your master volume up a tad.

Also, check your low end EQ in general. If you have the bass boost button pushed in, the bass knob turned up, and the bass EQ slider pushed up, you may be working your amp too hard (bass frequencies take more power to reproduce to human ears at a given volume than high frequencies do). That Carvin cab does not give you much true low end; you may be pushing your amp a bit too hard to try to get lows that the cab does not reproduce that well. See if you can borrow a 15 or something and try running the amp stereo full-range (not bridged). It may not be an improvement, but it might help. Possibly worth a try anyway.

Also, what input are you plugged into? If you have an active bass plugged into the passive input, you can overdrive the input if you're not careful.

And yeah, check that alcohol level!

I don't think you're "underpowering" your cabs; there's really no such thing IME. My guess is that you either (1) don't have enough power *for your gig* or (2) more likely, are starting to overdrive something in the signal path as the night wears on and you start to play harder.

 

One other thing to check...

You mentioned that your Gain and your Volume are at 5.

Try cutting the gain back to "0" or even "2" and boost the volume up higher. That way you will not be "overdriving" it, causing distortion. You will get a much cleaner signal by cutting the gain back and raising the overall volume.

By keeping the gain at or above the volume, you are, in essence, setting it to cause overdrive, much in the way a guitar player would overdrive his setup to "intentionally" get distortion.

 

I played an R600 for a while. With the settings you descibed, depending on the output of your bass, you could easily be clipping the power amps. I found that my R600 was very sensitive when bridged.

Chas