software

I was wondering if anyone owned or has played through the Carvin BelAir 2X12 50? It has a reasonable price tag and the bites I heard on their site were sweet. Thanks,
CoachCquot;You can leave if you want, we're just jammin, that's all.quot;
Jimi Hendrix

Haven't tried one, but check out the new Vintage Guitar (Tony Iommi cover), they give it a positive review.

A friend of mine got one, and he is very pleased with it. He have had it about 5 years now, and he wont part with it. He plays almost everything, and it suits him just fine.

One of the worst sounding amps I have ever plugged into. One was at a friends rehearsal space, I plugged in and could not get useable rock tones out of it. Took me right back to my Carvin X100B amp purchase back in 87. Still to this day the worst sounding amp I have ever owned. You get decent cleans out of them but I have absolutely no idea why they voice the gain like they do. YUCK

The Belair has a spectacular clean channel. The ‘soak channel is a bit muddy from the factory, but there are several simple mods to correct this.
Check out Hasserl’s web site for detailed descriptions on performing these mods…
from : localhost/schematics are the same for the Belair and the Nomad)

The amp is the loudest 50W amp you will find. Do not expect to get tube distortion at bedroom volumes. (Not kidding. Seriously loud)

Hey man, I bought a Belair earlier this year and I'll try to give you some impressions about it -

Construction - Very well built, the tweed lacquer holds up well, heavy but not backbreakingly so. There is a transformer rattle when I shift it around, but it is 2nd hand and gigged occasionally so I can live with that. The elctronics were fairly neat and well laid out, but (as expected) it heats up pretty quick and needs some type of fan to keep the temperature during extended playing.

Layout/Tone - Fairly simple layout with two channels and spring reverb. Reverb is great - lush and natural sounding. I usually set it to about 11 o'clock on the dial. Channel 1 is that great fender clean - a lot of chime and quot;airquot;, especially with single coils. It has much more clean headroom as I expected, but breaks up quite nicely when pushed. Since I'm going for a classic rock tone I usually push the treble and mids up on Channel 2, and boy does it thump. I found that strat type guitars are best for this amp, even tho I'm using a fat strat! Its got about 2/3s the drive of my old Marshall Anniversary, but a wee bit less defined and fuzzy. The soak becomes unusable after around 6 (too indistinct in my book - for that kinda tone I'd get a Tonebone Hot British) but the tones you can dial up are definitely up there for gigs and practice. This thing is loud as well, so the bedroom might not be the ideal place for it. Layout wise its fairly simple, but I've heard the Belair footswitch doesn't have an LED to tell you whether you've switched channels or not. Mine came with an aftermarket double footswitch which I recommend to turn off the reverb when you hit Channel 2.

Summary - A very good amp and worth more than the price I paid for it. For US dollars, huge bang for the buck if you're after a great vintage sound. The only amp that comes close to this is a Peavey Classic tone and price-wise, and from what I hear they're so similar its a good buy either one. As a comparison, I've used/owned a Silver Jubilee Marshall, Peavey 5150 and a Marhsall MG50. If you're getting a good price on it, I'd definitely give it a thumbs up, and would also recommend searching the net for some valuable upgrades (better tubes, speaker changes) with the money you've got left over. I've never heard them in person, but they apparently push the tone up a couple of notches.

Gotta agree with Kevlar, the Bel-Air is not a tone monster, IMO. I owned one for about a year, and overall I'd have to say the amp was somewhat sterile.

Thanks, guys, I guess mixed reviews.

CoachC

I've got a 1995 Carvin Vintage 33 that has a bunch of the hasserl mods. Swapped out the EL-84's for JJ's. Put in a Celestion Class Lead 80. Killer little 1x12 amp now. I also got a 4x10 carvin cab and sometimes run it to a 4x12 with Greenbacks.

The Belair is in the same family as the old V33 which is outy of production now. So I assuem you can get the same type of tones with the changes.

The mods totally help the Soak channel. They remove the diode clipping circuit (onboard distortion basically) and let the amp make it's own natural distortion. Then the values were changed in the Soak channel to be more like the Clean channel. It definitely has sizzle now. The JJ tubes were graded 37 for slight brown sound from Bob at eurotubes.com.

I have a few of soundclips of the Carvin 33 at from : localhost/

Just scroll down to the Carvin section. They were using the previous 1x12 speaker I had in it. New clips are coming with the new Classic Lead 80 speaker soon. I didn't do any clips with the gain maxed out yet.