mat (12/16/82)
Carver Corpopation (ie. Bob Carver) has come out with some nifty-looking and expensive boxes in the last couple of years. I've got his 201W/chan. amp and am quite pleased with it, except that the power supply buzzes a little (into the air, NOT into the line). I've heard the demo records for his Sonic Holography systems, and they are impressive. I'm strongly considering buying one of his pre-Amps, although I want to test the Hologram system out with some disks selected out of my own collection first. Does anyone have anything to say about these systems? Any great or horrible things?? Yes, I've seen most of the reviews. ALSO anything on the new Carver tuner? or the new NAD tuner? for that matter. Mail to me at hou5a!mat. hou5a is on houxz, harpo, and a bundle of other BTL machines as well. I will try to digest and post the results, unless you ask otherwise.
burris (12/16/82)
#R:hou5a:-18700:ihlpb:4000024: 0:2055 ihlpb!burris Dec 16 13:45:00 1982 As you may already know, Bob Carver used to be a design engineer for Phase Linear, and is a very bright guy. Some of his ideas, I don't quite agree with but they are no less innovative. The Carver Holographic preamp does indeed sound unique. It in affect takes advantage of the psycho-acoustic effect known as imaging in order to "broaden" the sound such that it seems to exceed the boundries of the listening area, or even the room. It accomplishes this by using a matrix circuit which compares the signals in the two stereo channels and altering the output (not tremendously different than some of the quad decoders but with only two speakers). For example, if a sound is destined to come from the left speaker only, the circuit would recognize this and create a lower amplitude signal in the right channel which is shifted in phase. This phase shifted signal, when summed acoustically by your ears, make the sound appear to come from a direction to the left of the left speaker. When this process is performed on the entire program, the result is similar to playing the stereo in a much larger space. I personally have reservations about this, or any other, system which introduces gross amplitude and phase distortion into the signal. This is one item best left up to the buyer. The Carver reciever was rated by "High Fidelity" as overall one of the best recievers they have tested. This recievers selling point is that it has special circuitry which takes over when the FM stereo signal is too poor. For a detailed explaination you can pick up a copy of HF at the news stand this month. Basically it synthesizes the stereo carrier to replace the one recieved from the station. This produces a "psuedo-stereo" which sounds quite convincing, but is not the true stereo signal as it was recorded. The primary consideration here is: if you are on a fringe area of FM stereo reception, would you rather switch you tuner to mono or would you prefer to recieve a relatively convincing simulated stereo signal. Dave Burris ihlpb!burris BTL - Naperville