The Mare C6
Some amplifiers are manufactured. The Mare C6 is built – by hand, in-house, one at a time.
Its origin is a single prototype from the 1930s: a one-off circuit that never reached production and spent decades on the edge of obscurity. Carbon spent years reverse-engineering it to the component level. What emerged was an amplifier unlike anything in contemporary production.
The architecture is worth understanding. Three tubes. A triode preamplifier feeding a single-ended pentode output stage – a topology that, unlike the push-pull designs that came to dominate the industry, preserves even-order harmonics rather than canceling them. Those harmonics are not distortion in the pejorative sense. They are the reason certain amplifiers sound like music.
The power section compounds this. Tube rectification introduces a natural, dynamic sag under transient load – a slight, elastic compression that push-pull and solid-state designs eliminate in the name of efficiency, and which players have been chasing ever since. The inductor filtering that follows shapes the supply in ways a capacitor bank cannot, smoothing ripple while preserving the dynamic behavior that makes the amp feel alive rather than inert.
The result is a signal path with almost nothing in it – and everything that matters left intact. Instruments don’t just pass through it. They reveal themselves.
The Mare C6 is not a recreation. It is a reimagining – the original circuit honored in full, its components updated to ensure the reliability serious work demands.
Architecture Triode preamplifier · Single-ended pentode output stage · Inductor- and tube-rectified power section · Extended input and output frequency range · 12″ speaker
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EACH CARBON AMP HAS A
UNIQUE VOICE
About Carbon Amps
Carbon Amps builds original tube amplifiers by hand in Los Angeles. Each one is conceived from the ground up — every component chosen, every circuit considered, every enclosure built to endure. The result is an amplifier with a voice entirely its own: harmonically rich, immediate, and alive under the hands in a way that modern production amps rarely are.
Our first production model, the Mare C6, is drawn from a one-off 1930s prototype and reconstructed with painstaking fidelity — a nearly forgotten chapter of guitar amplification, made available for the first time to working players, producers, and engineers.
No two Carbon amps are identical. Each is built to order, to last, and to be played.
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