Good thread, Erik, and good points in your OP!
To clarify some historical facts about the "Carver Challenge":
Aczel’s preprint of the amp matching effort Carver performed under his auspices was written sometime prior to January, 1983, while the Stereophile article appeared in October, 1985. So Carver’s effort with Aczel was performed well before the one with Stereophile, although the people at Stereophile were apparently unaware of it when their article was written.
Also, "The Audio Critic" didn’t quite go defunct; it resumed publication in late 1987, after a lapse of about six years during which time Aczel served as president of the Fourier Loudspeaker company (which did go defunct during that time, for a variety of reasons Aczel later described in TAC as including inadequate capitalization, too few dealerships, and a warehouse fire).
The target amp that was the subject of the Stereophile article, as stated in footnote 3 on the first page of the article Erik linked to, was a Conrad-Johnson Premier Four tube amp. The target amp that was the subject of Aczel’s article was a Mark Levinson ML-2, a very highly regarded and very expensive solid state pure Class A monoblock amplifier of the time, rated at about 25 watts into 8 ohms but capable of providing huge amounts of current and much greater power into low impedances.
The null test, as described by Aczel, was performed by connecting Carver’s amp and the target amp in the normal manner to speakers that were at inaudible locations, and connecting a monitor speaker and/or a meter at an audible location between the + terminals of the two amps, both amps being provided with identical inputs.
Although Carver was able to tweak his amps to obtain a remarkable null of 70 db or so in those efforts, as I recall he pretty much admitted in an interview with "The Absolute Sound" about 7 or 8 years ago that he couldn’t come close to maintaining that deep a null in production. And as Erik pointed out, the null was achieved with one specific speaker load.
I owned both the original M400, the cube-shaped amplifier in which Carver introduced his magnetic field power supply technology but which was not "transfer function modified" to emulate a different amp, and the subsequent M400t version which was designed to emulate the ML-2.
IME the original M400 sounded very poor, with a strange glare often being present. The M400t sounded surprisingly good, and was certainly an excellent value in relation to its price and its 200 wpc power capability. The most significant weakness in my experience with the M400t, using it with fairly easy-to-drive 7 ohm 90 db speakers, was that the size of the image it projected seemed somewhat constricted. But based on my experience with the two amps it would certainly seem that Carver’s efforts to emulate the sonics of the ML-2, and the technique he used in that process, provided considerable benefit.
Regards,
-- Al
To clarify some historical facts about the "Carver Challenge":
Aczel’s preprint of the amp matching effort Carver performed under his auspices was written sometime prior to January, 1983, while the Stereophile article appeared in October, 1985. So Carver’s effort with Aczel was performed well before the one with Stereophile, although the people at Stereophile were apparently unaware of it when their article was written.
Also, "The Audio Critic" didn’t quite go defunct; it resumed publication in late 1987, after a lapse of about six years during which time Aczel served as president of the Fourier Loudspeaker company (which did go defunct during that time, for a variety of reasons Aczel later described in TAC as including inadequate capitalization, too few dealerships, and a warehouse fire).
The target amp that was the subject of the Stereophile article, as stated in footnote 3 on the first page of the article Erik linked to, was a Conrad-Johnson Premier Four tube amp. The target amp that was the subject of Aczel’s article was a Mark Levinson ML-2, a very highly regarded and very expensive solid state pure Class A monoblock amplifier of the time, rated at about 25 watts into 8 ohms but capable of providing huge amounts of current and much greater power into low impedances.
The null test, as described by Aczel, was performed by connecting Carver’s amp and the target amp in the normal manner to speakers that were at inaudible locations, and connecting a monitor speaker and/or a meter at an audible location between the + terminals of the two amps, both amps being provided with identical inputs.
Although Carver was able to tweak his amps to obtain a remarkable null of 70 db or so in those efforts, as I recall he pretty much admitted in an interview with "The Absolute Sound" about 7 or 8 years ago that he couldn’t come close to maintaining that deep a null in production. And as Erik pointed out, the null was achieved with one specific speaker load.
I owned both the original M400, the cube-shaped amplifier in which Carver introduced his magnetic field power supply technology but which was not "transfer function modified" to emulate a different amp, and the subsequent M400t version which was designed to emulate the ML-2.
IME the original M400 sounded very poor, with a strange glare often being present. The M400t sounded surprisingly good, and was certainly an excellent value in relation to its price and its 200 wpc power capability. The most significant weakness in my experience with the M400t, using it with fairly easy-to-drive 7 ohm 90 db speakers, was that the size of the image it projected seemed somewhat constricted. But based on my experience with the two amps it would certainly seem that Carver’s efforts to emulate the sonics of the ML-2, and the technique he used in that process, provided considerable benefit.
Regards,
-- Al