Notice the attention to detail. The control cavity cover is held in with machine screws going into inset ferrules. There are ferrite beads on the output signal wires. The control cavity is thoroughly shielded with copper tape. The frets and neck are needless to say just joyfully precise. Sperzel locking tuners are a joy when changing strings and are pretty much on par with Grovers or good Yamaha or other high quality tuners.

Observe the precision of the neck joint. Notice the absolute minimal amount of wood removed from the pickup routings. There will be no swimming in this guitar boys and girls, we'd rather have more killer mahogany tone than a lack thereof.

Currently set up for a traditional Gibson-style 2 vol 2 tone, but also with mini-switches to tap each pup to single coil (yes believe it or not it can do a passable strat) and to put them out of phase. It has a 9 volt battery compartment in back that allows five-second battery changes, and it won't close if you put the battery in backwards, typical Carvin attention to detail.

I'll always prefer an ebony fretboard over anything else. It's hard and slippery and bright, and of course looks great. This guitar is technically not a DC200 because it doesn't have block inlays. DC400 would be block inlays and figured top.

It has the old-school active electronics unit. It has no passive option like the new ones. You can't get this anymore except amongst the vintage market. It's a great system because it has active EQ for bass and treble, a knob that controls the blend between the two pups, and a volume. You can use any passive pickups with this onboard preamp.