Suggestions welcome!
He achieved a successful result by live tweaking a prototype, a process that proved unstable and unsuitable for series production. Later Carver himself, said that it was impossible to duplicate his results in production amplifiers.
Carver was able to duplicate the sound of the selected C-J amp. However, the results were unstable and the similarity faded over time. Carver had to continually tweak the amps during the challenge and was never able to duplicate the sound over the long term, which is why the production models sounded nothing like the C-J.
This time, the listening went on throughthe whole afternoon and much of the evening,until all of us were listened out. Moreleisurely listening, refreshed by a goodnight’s sleep, failed to turn up anything. Asfar as we could determine, through carefulcomparisons and nit-picking criticisms, thetwo amplifiers were, in fact, sonically identical.It is a gross understatement to say thatwe were flabbergasted!
We're talking about a guy who stumped two audio magazines in a challenge and won, that has never been done before. How then can anyone imagine his products being mediocre? I never owned any Carver transfer function amps. But if the staff at Stereophile couldn't tell it apart from their $12,000 Conrad Johnson Premier five (or in the other case a Mark Levingson ML-2 for The Audio Critic), those must have been some pretty awesome sounding Carver amps.
A little over a year ago I was able to directly compare a pair of 9t's (transfer function), a Sunfire 600x2 and Bob's new KT88 tubes amps with him in the room. I can tell you in no uncertain terms that the new tube amps put the previous amps in the mediocre category with the 9t's being the worst of the lot. Everyone in the room was of the same opinion. Some might ask, what is this transfer function all about? It is very simple, add a 1.5 ohm, 50 watt resistor at the outputs.
Let me help ya out there a bit, Bill.You see the problem with Sushimaster's comment is that he doesn't have his facts straight. The amp Bob made up for the challenge was not what became known as a Carver transfer function amp.
absolutely genius
