Car Audio Central - Ultimate Car Audio Forum and Community

if you go with current models, look at Arc closely. good stuff, and the engineer from Zapco's formet C2K line works for Arc now, so you're getting a lot of the same brains going into those amps.

[quote="GlassWolf"]active is a better way to go yes.. if the amp crossovers are internal or external is your call though, but I agree having the redundancy of two crossovers in line doesn't help anything.
It's done more as a selling feature these days, and not for an improvement in purist quality.
One reason I like my old Orions.. nothing added to them unless it's external.[/quote]

I would love to score two 2500D's man. I missed out when Ikesound had the refurbs for a while, it's too bad. I am not even going to install that MA amp. Since I am using Elevation and Cadence for everything else, why use shit for the sub power? I will sell them locally, everyone here loves bling.....then I will invest in something like Arc or Zapco, something worth investment.....

wow this is some good stuff and i have learned alot!! yall are some very smart guys. i like this kinda stuff love car audio central you learn so much from people that know so much!! you thought you knew then you learn you were wrong. thanks guys.

active is a better way to go yes.. if the amp crossovers are internal or external is your call though, but I agree having the redundancy of two crossovers in line doesn't help anything.
It's done more as a selling feature these days, and not for an improvement in purist quality.
One reason I like my old Orions.. nothing added to them unless it's external.

Interesting info. Reading about transparency sparked a question. You mentioned that the least amount of circuitry yields the least amount of coloration of sound. Completely understandable.

Could this imply then, that is may be better to use an active crossover and an amp with no built-in crossover whatsoever, given that the active crossover and amp are just as transparent as each other? To me it seems that a built-in crossover inside an amp is just more circuitry right?

However, this could backfire because an active crossover is that much more circuitry for the signal to pass through before it even gets to the amp, however, keep in mind that I am asking about two active units that are both in theory as close to transparent as physically possible......I hope this is a clear enough question, and also worthy of an answer......

I don't think transparency really has a numeric value per se. It's simply a term used to explain a lack of anything added to the original source signal by anything in the signal path between the original medium (say, the CD) and your ears. signal processing, amplification, etc.. all of it adds some coloration, distortion, etc to the signal.. the less it adds, the more transparent the sound will be.. or the closer to how it was meant to sound with no alteration by external factors.

things like bass boost, equalization, and even the way transistors amplify the signal add color or harmonics to the original signal, so the signal is altered in some way.. be it audible or not.

this is why I like the KISS approach to audio systems.. the less the better.
the fewer things you need to add to a system, the closer to the original signal you'll get at the other end of the line.

Think of headroom like potential energy as opposed to the kinetik energy being used to actually produce the sound you hear.
an amplifier has a finite amount of power it can produce depending on the signal itself, duration, and so forth. That amount of power by and large is determined by the amplifier's power supply. The better the power supply portion of the amp design, the better it's going to be able to respond to peak transient bursts of demand, even at it's limits for RMS power production.. so at full volume, it's still got enough juice not to clip or sound "flat" because of compression of that dynamic range and power as the power supply nears it's limits.
Most amp power supplies, in good amps, can produce as much as three times the amp's RMS power rating.. that's the reserve power that helps define the amp's headroom.
Again though, not an easy thing to assign a quantitative value to, because you're talking about a lot of variables with audio amplification.

Damn, I was hopin someone would start tearin stuff up in here and get deep into theoretical/factual conversation.....I guess this thread is just going to die....

[quote="audiobass10"]I'd have to say I disagree 100%. You even proved yourself wrong in your post. In your example you are "WAY past the threshold of SQ". You're not going to hear the difference. It's gunna be loud under the circumstances you've given.
Now lets take one 8" sub played at moderate SQ volumes and do the same swap with the amp..a smaller amp take a Boss, Legacy and Pyle amp and a super SQ Zapco amp. Have someone install each amp and play each amp within its limits. You WILL NOT tell the difference. However, the majority of people who buy cheap amplifiers turn the gain all the way up from the beginning.[/quote]

I understand (or atleast THINK I understand) your point. However, GlassWolf hit the nail on the head in the post under yours about transparency, clipping, and headroom. These are all things that I was trying to explain in my post with lack of sufficient or correct vocabulary. I was using SQ to cover all of them, which I now see is a wicked mistake.

Keep this coming guys, I want to learn what terms I am misusing and what concepts I don't understand at this time. Constructive criticism is great, which is why I like it here. At CAF, well, we all know what these replies would have looked like over there, and where would it have gotten myself or any other reader education-wise? Nowhere.

Now that I know that transparency is the term used to describe the "coloration" or "lackof" in an amplifier's reperoduction of sound, now that I know that "headroom" is used to describe the amount of clean power that an amp can use for spikes at a particular gain setting, let's run with this. I already have a moderate understanding of good and bad clipping, and its effects on amps and subs. (Thanks to some Geo posts at CAF) I am versed on the damping factor of amps, however illegitimate that number may be due to too many parameters for one number, ie different impedances at different frequencies, I know it exists and a basic definition could be that it is meant to describe the "control" an amp has over a subwoofer. A damping factor discussion alone could fill 20 pages of forum.

What defines optimum transparency? I am believing that if transparency could be related to number-wise, from 1-10, 1 would be low transparency, meaning that the amp would sound less clean than a 10, which, with transparency, would not have a lot of "colorful" fill. I could be quite wrong, but please correct me if I am. Back to defining it, what I mean is, what PRODUCES better transparency in an amplifier? Better quality "innards"?

Headroom's next. Again I have my own "theory", and had I not been so excited to respond to you guys I would have read about this first through the search, which I WILL do after this post, but it's always good to have an open discussion on it, epsecially with open-minded people who know exactly what they are talking about. It seems to me that headroom would BEST be measured with an oscilliscope. This way you could play tones through the amp and use the scope at any certain gain to see at what gain settings the spikes start to clip, no? I am sure you could use a DMM to find out how much of a voltage peak you get with these spikes, but a DMM isn't going to let you know when there is clipping.....

This is all interesting stuff. When I first joined CAF 1000 and some-odd posts ago, I was like a dry sponge looking for water. I am personification proned by the way. After a while, I, the sponge, was starting to suck up the scummy residue left by the flame wars, and that sucked. Now, I have run myself under the sink, cleaned off the scummy residue, which there was a lot of, recycled the clean water I had soaked up from over there, and am eager to start soaking in more knowledge.

Thanks guys!!!!!!!!

working a bit backward here, putting a sub and amp into a car does not a good install make. To expound on this, things like proper box tuning and construction, driver and enclosure positioning, and amplifier setup can make a world of difference (I've personally fixed a lot of systems for customers free of charge simply by properly adjusting gain, crossover, etc on an amp installed by CC, BB, etc.. because the installer simply maxed out the settings for peak "power" (and distortion)) Install can make or break a system as much as choosing the right components for your goals.

In regards to CAF, Thy, Geo, and a handfull of others there are highly skilled, and very intelligent. It still baffles me why they bother to stay in that flame-fest of a forum, honestly, but people like them are the reason I said there are a few good ones there.. and as you noted, they are few and far between, and don't sadly make up for the overwhelming decline of Western civilization exhibited there.

About SQ (sound quality) amplifiers. As we've discussed many times here in the past, power is power, and a watt is a watt. The measure of an amplifier's quality or worth in any setting in my view, is based on it's transparency (ability to amplify the signal without adding any coloration), it's ability to produce it's full output without clipping the amplifier's power supply (headroom) thereby always having enough reserve juice for transient demands, and the overall build and design quality of the amplifier which details things like board and circuit design, choice of components and approach to things like power supply and circuit isolation, etc.
What all of that means to the owner is:
the ability to put out a lot of clean power without sounding flat of two-dimensional at high volumes
long lifespans for the amplifiers (think 10+ years of hard use without failures)
and things like well thought-out ergonomics for cable placement, connection types, setting panels, etc.

Any amp can put out a lot of power, but how long will it last? how clean or transparent is it? how much abuse can it take without sapping the power supplies? How easy is it to adjust settings once it's installed in the car with everything wired up?

I don't really draw any lines between amps for SQ and SPL, but I do draw a distinction between well-made nd cheaply-made products in this case.

and wont have equipment in 2 months. there is a reason i run autotek amps there thd is .1% with that low of a percent i can run much much much more power to my subs because they arnt getting near the distortion of a cheaper amp.