Here is the thing. Bob Carver was a showman (and a good engineer). His amps stock were indistinguishable from the much more expensive gear we sold (in the '80s I worked in a store in Seattle that sold Levinson, Goldmund, Accuphase, Audio Research, and Carver to name a few). Bob regularly came down from Lynnwood to demo his gear in our store. Nobody in the store could tell his amps from any of the other amps unless you did something like comparing a Carver vs. an Audio Research on a pair of Infinity Kappas or a pair of Apogees. In that case the Audio Research would struggle audibly because it couldn't handle the load while those old Carvers could. Regular speakers were indistinguishable between all of these amps. Even a Niles installation amplifier was indistinguishable unless you made the comparison on a speaker that taxed the amp it was being compared to (those old Niles were awesome, I still have one that I use for speaker development.) The punch line of the challenge is this line from the Stereophile article:
Bob took an amp that was indistinguishable in a level-matched test, exposed the listening panel to the amps in non-level-matched conditions were everybody could clearly hear a difference (due to the different levels), went behind his magic curtain and level matched the amps, came back and got everybody to agree (sighted) they sounded the same. Every trick in the book was used here, the Carver Challenge is an enduring myth. Welcome to the HiFi carnival. I would like to help you avoid the pitfalls of the industry, but don't have much faith at this point.
