Thoughts on this little oddity, anyone ...?

[William Sommerwerck]

His "Magnetic Field" amps were nothing of the kind. They simply employed
a triac-based voltage regulator in the AC supply to improve the regulation
factor of a ridiculously small iron transformer.

There /is/ such a thing as a magnetic amplifier, but this wasn't it. Other
claims made for this product were similarly untrue. One normally gullible
reviewer was so pissed-off that he told people how angry he was with Carver.

 

[William Sommerwerck]

I'm not even sure how you'd do this these days if you didn't get
one of these does-everything consumer amps.

You simply buy separate mono and/or stereo amps.

 

[William Sommerwerck]

"Klay_Anderson" <klay@klay.com> wrote in message
news:14356237.137.1320865621980.JavaMail.geo-discussion-forums@prnv30...
According to the manual:

"CONSTANT POWER SWITCH Set the rear panel slide switch to match the
impedance of the speakers used. Use the combined impedance value if you are
connecting speakers in series or parallel. Choose the nearest match if the
value is not exactly 4 or 8 ohms. Note that no damage will be done if the
switch is left in the wrong position. However, you may not benefit from the
full capability of the amplifier.
?? Constant power explained The typical amplifier is optimised to produce
full power into 4 ohms and therefore considerably less into 8 ohms. The PA
Series features a unique facility that ensures you get full power output
into either 4 or 8 ohm speakers. It does this by reconfiguring the power
supply for optimum current (4 ohms), or voltage (8 ohms)."

This was hardly unique to Carver. I remember a Sony amp that used such a
system, and there were undoubtedly dozens of others.

 

[Bruce Esquibel]

William Sommerwerck <grizzledgeezer@comcast.net> wrote:

Whatever Bob meant it to mean. Bob was notorious for coming up with
desciptions that bore little or no relationship to how the circuit actually
worked.

Yeah but that was his worst fault in my opinion.

At least the products he designed/built was reasonably priced and worked.

Some of it like the Sonic Hologram Generator built into a couple of the
preamps did work pretty close to his verbal description, if you could get it
setup properly. Once I got a copy of the "test record", everything fell into
place and I enjoyed that "effect" for years.

Some of the other stuff like the "Auto Correlator" was nothing more than an
adjustable noise gate and was a fairly useless waste of a button and knob.

Same with the TX11 tuner, unless you wanted to drop the 10K (at the time)
for the Day-Sequerra, that was a very good tuner for urban areas like
Chicago.

I probably owned at least one of everything Carver made up through the cd
player (digital time lens?) and never felt ripped off. The only things that
never survived my abuse was a pair of the cubes, but I still have a pair of
the 1.5t's and except for one that has a cold start problem, they both still
work just fine.

You guys are making him out like he was selling Tice Clocks.

That type of wordy hype was fairly common in the 80's, besides Carver there
was DAK Industries, sort of a Sharper Image of the time (which was another
one with long verbal descriptions), Hey! Drew Kaplan here, driving in to
work today I thought to myself, wouldn't it be great to have a electric
shaver that you could plug into your car lighter....

Then 8 or 9 paragraphs on how this razor was designed, developed and how
it's going to end world hunger and spread peace across the world.

Say what you want about Bob Carver but there was the satisfaction of being
the few peices of audio hardware with the "Made in USA" label on them.

-bruce
bje@ripco.com

 

[William Sommerwerck]

Some of it like the Sonic Hologram Generator built into a couple of the
preamps did work pretty close to his verbal description, if you could get
it
set up properly. Once I got a copy of the "test record", everything fell
into
place and I enjoyed that "effect" for years.

The SHG actually worked wonderfully with simply miked recordings. I no
longer use mine, but it made my own recordings sound more like what I'd
actually heard at the mic. That's saying something.

However... When I suggested that the device didn't /really/ work the way he
thought it did, and that he had possibly stumbled onto something
significant, Bob dismissed my suggestion. "No, it works the way it's
supposed to." It was like talking to John Atkinson.