Given Bob Carver’s track record of churning out innovative designs one after another there’s at least an outside chance that the guy is a good engineerI am in the middle of a Phase Linear 400 rebuild and saw this post, decided to chime in. I am a fan of Bob Carver designs myself - from speakers to subs to amp to preamps and processors. My sense from working on and rebuilding Carver equipment is that he is a fantastic designer/engineer (very much alive and still making amps to sell on ebay), who also wanted to make big profits and so would cheap-out on components to reduce manufacturing costs (or maybe the bean counters forced him to use inexpensive parts). This weakened the performance and reliability of many of the products he commercialized, but the upside is that we can buy that old hardware (often not working), spend a few hours replacing parts strategically (the Pacom caps in the Sunfire amps is a great example - and there are so many of them!) and end up with a great sounding resto-mod piece of gear. On the Phase Linear 400: great project amp, sounds fantastic when working (I managed to kill mine while trying to add a speaker protection relay - they are notorious for damaging speakers with DC when they fail... will resuscitate it eventually) and can hold its own against modern budget amps. And yes, the PL400 looks great with blue LEDs illuminating the extra large meters, Macintosh-style.
