Cheesey panel. Weak tuner. Sonic Holography is a nice novelty, but not enough to carry this preamp. Overall, sound was fine for the first 6 months, then the output began to intermittantly cutout. And, guess what, Carver Corp. no longer exists. Nobody (Sunfire included) honors the Carver warranty, either. So, into the local repair shop it went. My repairman (22 years experience) says the unit has so many flaky components that it isn't worth the money to repair it. He had it for a month replacing capacitors, resistors, etc,. In the end, it is back in my hands. The repair shop refused to charge me anything, as they couldn't warrant that the preamp would keep working. In short, a lemon. And nobody around to warranty the thing.

Overall neutrality of sound reproduction - and the price I paid.

Manuel FM tuning

Let me begin by saying that I have never been one of those 'audiophiles' who found it fashionable to bash Carver electronics. Double-blind listening tests - the only objective way to measure a products performance - administered by independent (and sometimes actively hostile) sources have proven the quality of Carver stuff many times over. Alas, we are all susceptible to a marketing strategy that relies on snobbery to coerce us into buying everything from certain brands of blue jeans to the latest odor-suppressing revelation in breath mints. There is a lot of very fine audio equipment out there; some of it heartbreakingly expensive and worth every penny, and some of it sheer monuments to overproduced and sickeningly overpriced mediocrity. Take your choice - but if you demand your interior wiring be smelted from bits of Martian-meteor in a nuclear furnace, and the heat-sinks in your amplifier shielded in rhino hide because it gives the sound stage a ‘piquant clarity’ that simply kicks Conrad-Johnson rump, then you probably won’t want to read any further. Indeed, this review may force you into the arms of your personal audio advisor for comfort. Don’t worry, he’ll tell you what to like - right before he embarks on his next career at the used car lot.
Any way . . .
I picked up the CT-24 at an e-bay auction on a whim - just to give it a try if you will. The unit is large, heavy and well-built. The face plate and displays are attractive and the controls have a nice clean feel. I auditioned this product for several hours, with several different pieces of music; including classical, acoustic folk, rock, lots of piano,and finally a Sheffield Lab’s audiophile reference disc. The Carver CT-24 turned out to be aggressively neutral - the highest praise I could give any pre-amp. It neither added or detracted anything in the invisible chain that leads from the source to the speakers. What more could you want?
Well, for starters, a tuner that does not take all day, and half of the next, to proceed from one end of the FM bandwidth to the other. Manuel tuning is simply awful. I lost three teeth and most of my hair trying to get from a NPR station on the bottom to an alternative-rock station at the top.
But this is my only complaint. The CT-24 is a fine unit. You could do much worse than to pick one up - if you can find it. Too bad Carver is in bankruptcy.

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A piece of crap. I got it for $259 and it arrived defective. besides the malfunctioning switches, it had cross talk between inputs, had a high noise flootr, buzzed when the remote was used to change the volume, and the Volume control by remote was imprecise as hell. utter junk.
Kudos to Saturday Audio for the way they handled my complaint. It sat in its box unopened for 6 months after I bought it, and they took it back after that long period of time. Randy's the man!