Meeting Bob Carver Tomorrow!

[Thomas savage]

Way beyond "nice" bro, as close as you can get to living on the Caribbean Islands here in the continental US. A little slice of paradise.
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You got some yummy mummy's about that pool ?

 

[Sal1950]

You got some yummy mummy's about that pool ?

Oh hell yes, a old geezers heaven. I hide my eyes behind those dark sun glasses and ogle the young hotties in skimpy bikinis to my hearts content. Maybe one day I'll even find a lovely to give an old man some mercy love.

 

[RayDunzl]

Oh hell yes, a old geezers heaven

The Clubhouse is where all the action is.

 

[Sal1950]

The Clubhouse is where all the action is.

Now that there's funny!

 

[Jakob1863]

No this had nothing to do with killing his business. It didn't really piss off the press. What it actually did among readers of the Absolute Sound and Stereophile was...............a ...............big.................fat.................nothing. Didn't fit with people's world view and was simply ignored. Audio magazine and Stereo Review regularly reviewed and gave good commentary to Carver's gear and discussed the innovative circuitry. John Gordon Holt et al were revered and trusted like no other reviewers. They were agreeing he fully met the challenge. Yet people just overlooked this. A year later no one much mentioned it or would bother to discuss it. Just too far out for them to accept in their view of things. Just like the Acoustat owner who initially wouldn't even let me hook up the Carver to them. Yet sat stunned at how well it played them.

People forget prior to the Stereophile challenge he did one for the Audio Critic. Made his amp sound identical to the then $7000 Mark Levinson ML2 amps. I guess that mag had less circulation, and wasn't a subjectivist stronghold. Plus the idea of mimicking a SS amps with an SS amp didn't get noticed as much as an SS amp mimicking a top vacuum tube amp of the day.

Similar to when I connected a triode VTL amp to power resistors and fed the result to a Spectral and it sounded just like a triode amp only with more power. People just don't wrap their head around it and don't really believe it happens. I have told numerous people who prefer triodes or even SET amps they could do this and feed the thing to a good SS amp and have all the SET power they need. They don't believe the SS amp has an envelope of performance larger than the SET and the SET can do nothing the SS amp can't amplify with good fidelity. The sound of those vacuum tube units are all a coloration a good amp can reproduce fully.

Beside other, sometimes quite suprising and ill defined, generalizations within the audiophile world view, the Carver challenges seem to confirm a lot of the underlying assumptions, if taken seriously. That´s why i am often suprised that the challenges were every so often used as contradictionary examples for the subjectivistic approach to audio.

The subjectivists approach was based on the impression that usual measurements (linear and non linear distortion and the according noise and power measurements) were not telling the whole story, as amplifiers could still give different sonic impressions although data shows, if compared to the usual thresholds of human hearing, that no difference should be perceptable. That was more or less the reason for Gordon Holt to start Stereophile in the 1960s.

And additionally it was based on the assumption that reviewers/listeners are able to evaluate, although doing it subjectively, and to describe in an objective manner the sonic differences between various audio devices. I don´t know if in the early years someone already thought about controlled listening tests including blinding, as i think it was Dan Shanefield in the 1970s, who first brought that idea to the evaluation of multidimensional sound impressions.

If you compare the two Carver challenges to these assumption you´ll find confirmation in there, especially if you take the description seriously.

Of course, there is at least another explanation possible, but then we have to drop the challenges as an argument....

 

[amirm]

And additionally it was based on the assumption that reviewers/listeners are able to evaluate, although doing it subjectively, and to describe in an objective manner the sonic differences between various audio devices. I don´t know if in the early years someone already thought about controlled listening tests including blinding, as i think it was Dan Shanefield in the 1970s, who first brought that idea to the evaluation of multidimensional sound impressions.

That's a fascinating point! That maybe the entire evaluation was faulty and as such, it was a roundabout way of convincing subjectivists of something by him mucking with the gear and making them think he had succeeded.

 

[Jakob1863]

That's a fascinating point! That maybe the entire evaluation was faulty and as such, it was a roundabout way of convincing subjectivists of something by him mucking with the gear and making them think he had succeeded.

Although the paragraph you´ve cited was meant to be related to the start of Stereophile in the 1960s, as the guys from Stereophile planned to do a "blind test" (but dropped it in the second round due to their impression that Carver did succeed) and the AudioCritic folks did a "blind test", yes that was the other explanation i was thinking about.

We simply don´t know .....