A friend of mine in high school had the original Carver Receiver. At the time Carver was really an interesting mix of both quite the marketing machine as well as some really interesting approaches to audio.
If you're a glutton for punishment below is roughly 3.5 hours of video including schematics on the second generation Carver Receiver. To me the most interesting technology was the "magnetic field amplifier" and the FM tuner section. I agree with the reviewer, the FM tuner in that receiver was absolutely amazing. With the amplifier section, you definitely make some trade-offs to get the high power. I seem to recall it didn't like low impedance speakers and we managed to trip the protection circuit on more than a few house parties.
I never cared for the "sonic holography" - even when you listened in the appropriate sweet spot it never sounded good to me. It was interesting to hear the demos coming from my current HTPC over YouTube. Unless you turned off every bit of multi-speaker DSP and ran the demo with only two speakers the sound was awful and essentially sounded like everything was out of phase.
If you're a glutton for punishment below is roughly 3.5 hours of video including schematics on the second generation Carver Receiver. To me the most interesting technology was the "magnetic field amplifier" and the FM tuner section. I agree with the reviewer, the FM tuner in that receiver was absolutely amazing. With the amplifier section, you definitely make some trade-offs to get the high power. I seem to recall it didn't like low impedance speakers and we managed to trip the protection circuit on more than a few house parties.
I never cared for the "sonic holography" - even when you listened in the appropriate sweet spot it never sounded good to me. It was interesting to hear the demos coming from my current HTPC over YouTube. Unless you turned off every bit of multi-speaker DSP and ran the demo with only two speakers the sound was awful and essentially sounded like everything was out of phase.