Chiming in a decade late but with the internet everything's permanent, right? Around the time the PL came out there was a growing high end consensus that very high power was a good thing. There are technical arguments in favor of this. Carver's amp was the first one to offer that kind of power and did so at a cost that some hobbiest types - as opposed to rich sybarites - could afford. In blindfold listening tests the PL400 scored very high, pitted against some fancy name competition. 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 engineer, and that his amp was as good or better than the competition - in fact there wasn't any before his amp caught on. A lot of the negative stuff I read about Phase Linear and Carver is written by people who seem to be haters or hucksters rather than objective and nuanced thinkers.
