Well ..This Is Interesting...What Do You Think.?? Food For Thought..Or BS?

I just watched the video in full.  Forget about the Carver challenge, the real value of the video is its well explained survey of the vagaries of component interaction, particularly the amp - speaker interface, where the reactance of the speaker creates a unique sound signature with the amplifier in use, more so if the amp has a low damping factor.  Also interesting that the declining hearing acuity of older enthusiasts (mea culpa) is played up. If we believe in accuracy, the load invariant amp with minimal SINAD is best, as someone named Amir contends. Straight wire with gain. Keep your transfer function!

To the original point (modestly priced electronics perform as well as high priced gear), I came to that conclusion several years ago.  I finally had to admit to myself that my own pretensions and desire for bragging rights constituted a big part of my buying decision-making.  Over the last few years, I have started using some of my old Heathkit, Onkyo (pre- their disastrous decision to focus on HT), Luxman, and Concept receivers and separates.  And I don't think I've given up any quality in sound quality.  I still have some (what I consider to be) high end gear on a three of my larger systems (Everest DD67000, Tannoy Westminsters, Apogee Studio Grands, but vintage on Salon 2 and a bunch of smaller scales systems, and I can't hear any difference except for the larger dynamics of the big floor standing speakers.  Now I'm going to start looking for some of Carver's old stuff.  I gave a Carver Receiver to one of little brothers in the early days, and he's still loving it.  I don't remember what happened to mine, but it's not in my storeroom.  I kept all of the separates when I started the transition back to vintage receivers, so I can go back up the scale if the bug bites me again. 

Bought my Carver amp at Crazy Eddie's in Brooklyn back in the "cave days".Eddie was a s..m bag Carver was a genius.High end is a scam.The fun is spending as little as possible and getting a great sound system.Anyone with money can buy anything and the industry comes up with layer after layer of hyperbole to lie about what their equipment can do.Most of it is backed by vapor science.The real meat of the matter is what is going on psychologically with this subset of mostly white men with high disposable incomes that succumb to this nonsense.Theres a hole in their emotional lives that is filled in by faceplate and knobs.Bizarre indeed.

Carver is maybe 95% BS and 5% substance. He does make amps that...produce sound.

• "Liftetime" warranties on amps when the average Carver company lifespan is ~ 10 years at best. 
• Tube amps "rated" at 75 Watts, using 15 Watt transformers. All his last company’s tube amps (whatever incarnation) were WAY undersized in iron for their rated powers. Compare the weight & watts to ANY other make of tube amps. 
• 600 Watt (1200 into 4 ohms) powerhouse amps (Sunfire) without much heat, or weight - nor a shred of nuance and refinement in the sound.
• Made the power modulating amps sound revolutionary when it had all been done before (Class G, Class H, BASH). Panasonic stuffed the BASH tech into cheap boomboxes in the 90s. The difference was Carver had the balls to market this to audiophiles. I had a Sunfire amp and a Panasonic boombox in the past; think I liked the latter better.
• Calling a natural feedback mechanism "the amp hears the room and adjusts" or some such nonsense

He comes off mostly as a BS artist and gimmick salesman. Maybe he has really good Electrical Engineering chops too - but IMO there’s a world of difference between what he does versus someone like Nelson Pass (good).

@mulveling 

Not that there’s anything incorrect in your post, but Bob is more than just a huckster and we’ve got to give it to him that he started a number of notable audio trends:

- High-powered amplifiers: his Phase Linear 700 dates back to 1970. Yes it caught fire and blew up speakers willy-nilly, but 350wpc out of a smallish 17" enclosure was unheard of. That prodigious power output was made possible by the DTS410 power transistor, which was made not by Fairchild or Sanken or Motorola but by... Delco. It was an early electronic-ignition automotive transistor, in which Bob correctly saw audio potential. By the way, a properly restored PL700 is still a contender today. 

- Lightweight high-powered amplifiers: his so-called "Magnetic Field" power supply circuitry first appeared in 1980’s M-400 "Cube", a notoriously overheating and so tightly packed as to be near-unfixable piece of junk (but it was pretty). The "Magnetic Field" topology essentially employed a switching mode power supply to dynamically modulate the amp’s power supply rails - more or less Class H. I could be wrong but I think BASH amps came out later.

- Making false statements about the sound quality of lightweight, high-powered amplifiers: that one never gets old, witness Class D

- Would it be fair to say that Bob single-handedly invented deceptive and misleading audio marketing?

In any event, everything else put aside, Bob was a trailblazer and something of a genius.