Carver TX-2

Name: Carver TX-2
Brand: Carver

The Carver TX-2 is an AM/FM stereo tuner, and one of the less-documented pieces in Carver's lineup. What the record shows comes mostly from a few period reviews in Audio and a single owner thread.

Audio (October 1985, p.61) pitched the TX-2 at listeners who had given up on AM and FM as background-only formats because of signal quality. The headline feature was Carver's Asymmetrical Charge-Coupled FM Stereo Detector. The review promised that stations you could never quite tune, "the FM station behind the hill," were suddenly waiting to become presets. An earlier piece in Audio (October 1984, p.36) was just as direct. Many AM stations sounded surprisingly good once the TX-2 was in the signal path, and the tuner included an FM dipole plus 75- and 300-ohm terminals for external antennas. Power draw was modest: 120V AC, 60Hz, 15 watts max.

A later Audio piece (1986, p.55) described the preset system. It had 13 presets that could be any mix of AM and FM, selected in any order on the dial and recalled instantly. The memory held all 13 presets even with the unit unplugged for up to three weeks, and the tuner returned to the last station listened to each time it was powered on.

Owner-level documentation is thin. A single Audiokarma thread (December 2010) has an owner calling the TX-2 "seems pretty decent" while noting the digital display is dim. He asks whether a small backlight bulb is the cause, and the thread doesn't answer. Another participant mentioned someone on eBay selling a replacement chip for display-related problems, but no part number or repair procedure is confirmed. No full specification sheet, original price, or production years are documented in the sources on hand.