Thoughts on this little oddity, anyone ...?

You simply buy separate mono and/or stereo amps.

"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.

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 snipped-for-privacy@ripco.com

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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.