@holmz +1 My thoughts exactly. that Stereophile nonsense caused me to suspect Mr. Carver so many years ago; the latest debacle with an amplifier that can't make anywhere near full power sealed the deal IMO.
And if you want good S.Q. buy first and to begin with some good gear....It is not so difficult because electronic audio engineering is mature technology for many DECADES... 70 years ? or 60 ? or 50 ? We must ask atmasphere for that, he knows....
Its nice to think audio is a mature technology. But its no-where near as mature as people like to think. If it was, tubes would not still be around; solid state circuits would have replaced them and no looking back (as happens in any field where the new tech replaces the prior art). The problem has been that the semiconductors needed to really supplant tubes (meaning: to make a solid state amp that isn't harsh) didn't exist in the 1970s or 1980s. We had a proper understanding of control theory in that time, but oddly, didn't apply it to audio (probably because if that was actually a goal, no power amplifiers would have been produced 😁). So feedback networks for the most part have been poorly designed and we have several decades worth of solid state amps that come off harsh and bright, especially when you turn it up. IMO this is mostly because the gear was made to make money so the companies making it didn't care that it fell well short of the goal of sounding like real music. Sorry to sound curmudgeonly...
This has been what has kept tube amplifiers in business the last 70 years since they do offer a way around this issue (they make enough lower ordered harmonics to mask the harshness of the higher orders they also make).
But in more recent times semiconductors have advanced to the point where you can get rid of that pesky brightness/harshness for which solid state is known. IMO we've only just arrived near the top of the R&D sigmoid curve in audio in the last ten years or so.