While I have owned several Carvin bass cabinets, a bass, and other Carvin sound gear, I have never thought their bass amplifiers were quite right for me. Until now. ..
The recently released Carvin bass amp BX500 is one of the best bass amps I have experienced. It offers many more features than my beloved Markbass Little Mark 2 and it comes in at a sale price of around $400. That is insane for an amp this good.
There are certain features that I like to have in a bass amp. Sometimes they are hard to come by but this amp has everything. Number one on my list is I like having a 12AX7 tube and a drive knob to control it. This Carvin amp has it. That helps get me the grit sound I like on occasion for rock songs.
It is important to me to have a ground lift and a DI level control too because some places I play have bad wiring and some house soundboards need more DI signal. I was pleasantly surprised this amp has both those features.
I like have a mute button so when I am tuning it is not going through the speakers. In addition, I like a headphones jack for practicing quietly in my house or hotel room. This amp comes with a tuner output and headphone jack all in one on the back panel.
I find it helpful to have a protect LED light so I can gauge if I am driving the amp too hard. Carvin provides that in this bass amp as well. In fact, the protection circuit will kick in and cut the signal for 5 seconds. By switching the amp off for ten seconds, the amp resets itself. This is better than blowing the amp up which I have done in the past with older amps that did not have this feature.
A little feature that I am seeing more and more nowadays is Speakon sockets with ¼” jack inputs in the center of them. I love this feature just because it simplifies the design.
Another option I like to have in a bass amp, which this amp supports, is the capacity to run bass cabinets at 8, 4 or 2 ohms. Because I have all sorts of configurations of bass speakers, I need a flexible amp that can handle all those loads.
I am normally not a big fan of too many knobs but I found in this case that it was easy to get many good sounds out of this amp quickly. This amp has three separate tone shaping sections and I found them easy to work. Besides, they actually did change the sound a lot. On many amplifiers I have tried, it seems like no matter how much you turn the knobs the change in sound was slight or too radical. I can get lost in complex parametric EQs and sliders. That is not the case with this Carvin bass amp. Using the simple parametric EQ and graphic EQ to fine-tune the sound, I could get the thick rock sound I like to use most. However, I was able to get a killer slap tone, reggae tone and finger-funk tone as well. I have not tried a pick with it yet but I am sure I can get a good sound with that too. This amp is intuitive even with all the knobs.
Having a compressor is great. I do not use them a lot but in some situations, they are nice to have. This Carvin bass amplifier has one built in so I do not have to carry an extra piece of gear. And it works well with its 3:1 ratio so this feature is great bonus.
I found the amp to be plenty loud enough for most of my situations too. At 300 watts for 8 ohms and 500 watts at 4 and 2 ohms that delivers as much as my Markbass Little Mark 2 and that has always been plenty too.
I would say the only thing I wanted more of was tube presence. When I turned up the tube I definitely got grit and grind but I think the tube that is being using in the amp is probably a crappy one. I will replace that with something other than the Electro Harmonix tube I suspect is in there and probably get a lot better sound out of it.
I also am a little concerned about the knobs getting broken off. Especially the graphic EQ sliders because I have had that happen on other pieces of gear. I am carrying the amp in a padded laptop bag but I am making a piece of foam to fit over the front of the amp so the knobs and sliders are protected. I could put it in a rack and Carvin does make a rack mount for the BX500 bass amp but I do not want to carry another rack.
In conclusion if you are looking for a bass amp that is versatile and offers many features that really work, the Carvin bass amp BX500 is an excellent find. At $400 I do not think you will find a better bass amp than this one.
You will not find Carvin gear here unless you can find something used. However, you will find the Markbass Little Mark 3, which I recommend you compare with the Carvin BX500.
Guitar Center is also one of few places that carries D’Addario Bass Strings, Chromes. These are flatwounds which I recently tried and I felt really great sounding for rock. I got the regular light gauge set 45-132, 5-String long scale for around $50. These are a lot cheaper and just as good as more expensive string brands.