Test 50 Pound 800 Watt Amp vs 17 Pound 6400 Watt Amp 

Very cool and wise and yes, continuous power out needs a big cord and breaker. Yes, burst power specs don't translate well to extended low frequency output. That said, newer amps like the powersoft will run on 120, 208, or 240 single phase or 3 phase, and when run at higher voltages the cable sizes can be thin and the amps tend to have increased duration burst power. In the amps I tested, the crest put out 400 continuous and the PowerSoft put out 540 watts continuos so even though smaller and lighter, the powersoft still has more output than the crest in continuos measurements as well, so that is another aspect to consider.

@@DaveRat I can see using a high burst power for mids and highs after my RG dynamic expander since it can add up to 20 dB. If I was going mobile again I would also consider running modern amplifiers but I am all but retired and just have a nightclub with a 10,000 watt (Continuous RMS) sound system. In general, sound equipment today is so much better than that of the past. I have a pair of Altec subwoofers that require a fork lift to move and my JBL line array subs blow these away.

Agreed

"You can never put out continuous power greater than what you put in." Say that again for the kids in the back. It's amazing how many people don't understand this, ultimately continuous power is a simple thing to solve for, and it allows you to cut through the marketing BS to see what an amplifier actually produces, power wise because they might be able to lie on the box, but they cannot lie on the spec sheet and retain UL certs.

Of course, we are way beyond that elementary concept for beginners. We are looking at the ability of amps to offer peak power profiles that more closely parallel the power needs of the music being reproduced and the ratings of the speakers that amps are connected to. The video shows 2 amps with similar RMS outputs and one amp that has a peak power 6db above the RMS. This peak power allows louder playback withoutsignificantly increasing ac power draw. And I demonstrate and you can hear how much louder the amp capable of processing clean 6 db peaks is. In the video. Or maybe watch the vid?

Thank you and honored!

Albert Einstein once said: (and i'm paraphrasing) If you can't explain your knowledge to a 10 year old... then you don't truly understand it yourself.

I do find that researching and doing these videos helps me understand things better and I learn something every time

@@DaveRat That is the most amazing and awesome statement, Dave. My pride in my rat tattoo has only grown over the years. Thank you for what you've done and what you continue to do.

Thank you Dave! You rule! Saw a message on FB and will open and read soon.

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🤙👍🤙 ha! Yes I'm glad somebody spotted that. The coolest part of the demo is being able to listen to exactly what the amp is putting out at a reasonable volume and not just look at pictures and graphs.

Awesome thank you!

Awesome and thank you! Yeah these things do take some time to do. This was actually two separate videos initially and I merge them into one to solidify the concept

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Awesome and thank you!

True

Yes it's all about selecting the right tool for the job. And thank you

Thank you and awesome!

Awesome so cool and yeah I remember doing spin doctor's gigs! Thank you and great to see you still rocking!

Thanknyou

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So cool! Great to see ya here Charles and thank you!!

Well you now have some and cool cool David!

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Welcome and thank you!

@@DaveRat Thank you for your kind reply!

Thank you for joining and hope you get some cool and useful info here

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Will do.

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That is less true in modern class d amps where watts are cheap and building high voltage amps is not any harder. But yes, with older amps, it was useful to run lower impedance loads to get maximum amp power.

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Yeah, I will ponder an efficiency vid

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Cool, am building a new load with 4x 200 watt and 4 x 250 watt 8 ohm loads on a 1/2" thick aluminum plate. Mat sandwich a second plate on top which should give me the ability to power test in known precision resistive. Also I have a dead dishwasher that I will pull the heating element out of and see if that will give me a second option. Looking to do a test of actual power delivered using music. So I'm thinking of a combination of the loads plus a playlist and scope to right before clip while monitoring load temps over time with a thermal camera. Also monitoring input current to the amp Determine which amp heats the load faster. See if I can gain visible insight into various amp efficiencies and capabilities.

That should provide interseting results...I'm looking forward to the thermal cam images!@@DaveRat

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Very true and that's a test for a different day. Though I can say that when we switched from conventional amps to Class D for a large format sound systems, our current draw from the mains dropped significantly and output volumes increased. That said the differential between average current draw and peak current draw increased

We have a load of 4 channel Chevin amps that sound great and work well Good amps

Chevin amps have a switch mode power supply with a linear output stage using mosfets instead of bipolar output transistors. Very fast slew rate and extended high-frequency response. Great sounding amps.

Yes I can understand that and also modern class D amps from top end manufacturers have quite impressive sound. The new L-Acoustics amp that is two rack spaces and 1600 watts per channel and 8 ohms with 16 channels is amazingly impressive in its power output, power density add fidelity

even Logitech did that in the Z-Cinema lol

🤙👍🤙thank you

I would like to do that I would need to find a class D amp that has no digital processing as the digital processor would cause a time offset preventing the null. I almost recall doing something similar to that with amplifiers I will ponder it

PLX amps always seemed to have a reputation for not being ideal for bass. They were early innovators of SMPSU's and they have come a long way since then!

I had the same experience with the qsc when comparing the Crest 7001 but it wasn't the PLX it was an older amp We AB compared The sound and the crest was punchy and full on the QSC kind of popped with no follow-through. I've tested numerous amplifiers over the years using a pulse and a block of four double 18 bins and had a wide variety of results. The first lightweight amp that performed well was the lab group in 6400 Now when comparing a Crest 7001 to a power soft X4, which of course is rated much higher power, The power soft dominates the 7001 and makes it sound broken. I think if you compare usable output level of a 1000 Watt Class D app to 1,000 w conventional amp, The conventional amp will win with anything that has low end to it. But if you compare the amps using metrics like equal weight equal cost, equal power draw from the wall, watts per pound, equal heat dissipation, and even Fidelity per dollar spent if you can measure that, you will find that the class D amp will win in nearly every way. I would say as a rule of thumb you want two to three times the wattage out of a Class D amp than you would want out of a conventional amp when used for subwoofers.

@@DaveRat It's an interesting topic. Since by design modern switching amps should have a much much lower internal resistance than their analogue counterparts, they should absolutely destroy the older amps in terms of power output. I have always heard however, but never actually seen until now that power soft are clearly limiting the current thought the PSU. What surprises me even more is this is a 4ch amp driving one channel. I was under the (incorrect) assumption that the available PSU power was available for all channels, so for example on a 4ch amp driving 1ch to the rails would be able to do so without current limiting. What's also interesting is it seems there is a recovery period as at @10.22 that power doesn't come back immediately. I wonder how it would behave with 4 ohm or even 4 channels at 4 ohm.

They spec that out and list symmetrical output power with all channels driven the same and asymmetrical output power with two of the channels driven 6db lower level as would happen with bi-amplification. I believe this symmetrical output is 1600 watts per channel all channels driven and the asymmetrical output is 1800 watts on two of the channels with the other two channels driven at 450 Watts. For my test I didn't really focus on getting the exact power measurement and I'm sure there was some power drop in the long extension cord I had running the amp reducing its output

Well car Hi-Fi had a big impact on those super high pequat ratings from small amps that didn't actually deliver more sound. Then cheap PA kind of jumped on the bandwagon. If my memory serves

Yes the same issue existed with class A B and older amps, crappy amp sounded bad no matter what they are rated at and good amps performed well.

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Yes, agreed

Ah, that feels good............... 🔈🔉🔊

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Agreed.

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Epic and thank you! I do try very hard to share info I think will be useful that is unbiased

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Agreed

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If you do the math there a 6DB crest factor would mean that a 500 watt amp would need a 2000 w peak because 6dB is four times the power. The apps that I measured show the class D having more continuous power and more peak power and fully capable of meeting the specs you propose

@@DaveRat Yes, I use all Class D. The weight savings and efficiency is a must in the modern era. I remember when I had boat anchor QSC RMX and Crown CE2000s amps as a kid when first getting into audio. My how time flies when you're having fun! Thanks as always, Dave!

Awesome thank you Josiah!

Funny thing about crest factor is that it's affected by bandpass filtering. Guess what every loudspeaker on earth is, even before you add extra processing? A simple sealed box is a second order high pass filter, and that alone can make your 6 dB CF content suddenly look like 9 dB... What actually hits the speaker is rarely quite so dense. That is of course, unless you've not brought enough rig for the gig or don't have amps with sufficient peak voltage swing to handle the 12 dB CF side-chained kickdrums that sit on top of the rolling sub...

Interesting

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🤙👍🤙 as we should be

For that to be true you would want to have equal amounts of usable output capability. For the amps I tested the old app was 400 Watts and the new amp was 540 Watts, so the new app was louder for continuous power which would benefit the dance systems and it was louder for peak power which would benefit the dance systems and all systems. And it was smaller lighter and more efficient generating less heat. That said if you were to get aClass D amp rated at 400 Watts and compare it to an older app also rated at 400 Watts The older app would be preferable but cost more, be larger, generate more heat, use more power from the wall, and weigh more

Agreed and the question is, would an EDM subwoofer perform better on a Class AB amp rated at 1,000 Watts RMS that can do 1200 watt peaks or perform better on the Class D amp also rated at a 1000 watts RMS but can offer 4,000 w peaks? The class D could be lighter, smaller and draw less power from the wall due to efficiency and deliver the same power to the speakers RMS and offer the peaks as well. I don't disagree that having longer duration power delivery is important for more consistent signals. What I debate is whether Class A B amp is actually beneficial or just a larger more powerful yet smaller and lighter class D amp would do equally well or better

@@DaveRat The last question is the pondering point. Doing a dubstep gig a dozen years ago on JBL 4880a with I Tech 8K power we could smell the VC heat at ~500W/ch continuous. Peaks on dub are mostly a matter of performer fader position choices, so from a genre standpoint the smaller, lighter, tastes great, less filling Class D amp *should* suffice in my example. For a rock show with lead kick drum, the time it takes the output power of the class D to taper down isn't an issue until the double kicks; having that 6dB of extra output for 250ms is just right. Big stiff power supplies are big, heavy, and expensive making that extra transient headroom even more resource consuming. Your demo of the Crest just on the edge of clip sounds very compressed compared to the PowerSoft at the same long term (clip) point. That makes me think the folks who advocate for the Crests have rosier memories and less painful backs than myself.

I can fully relate to the skepticism of the claims from many amplifier manufacturers. Clearly audible issues will often not show up in specifications. At rat sound we used to do tests when any amplifier company came to the shop by running their amp bridge mono into four 16 ohm rat subs wired in parallel. Then we would use a pulse test and compare their amp to the amplifiers we were using which were Crest 7001 at the time. This test would clearly divulge any issues with the various amplifiers. I remember a QSC amp rated at 4000 Watts sounded like a wet tire compared to the 1800 watt Crest 7001. The lab group in FP6400 was comparable but only with three subs in parallel bridge mono. Adding the fourth sub sent the amp unstable. Putting a PowerSoft X4 on the subs clearly was more powerful and clear than the crest 7001. Developing a test that allows you to easily hear the difference is wise and I probably take that for granted more than I should as I have much experience in that realm. I will try and do a video down that line of testing so people can develop tests that work for them

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I do love the old crests and also when we switched from Crest to the modern class D amps our sound systems sounded dramatically better. That said when we first started switching to lighter weight amps many years ago, we tested everything and found some amps were rated very high wattage and sounded like crap and other ones sounded much better and there was no consistency. I believe that's still the case as it is with the older style amps as well.

Not as extreme as the cost of hard drives and computer memory, The dollar per watt cost of audio power amps has dropped tremendously over the years. As has dollar per pound. What has increased is dollar per rack space. Switching to modern high quality amplifiers can add new life to an older sound system by increasing available power to the speakers as well as enhanced protection of the speakers utilizing the multiple programmable limiters and compressors available in many of the top amps. This will also increase reliability and reduce power draw from the grid as well as lower the heat dissipation and reduce overall size. I have done several upgrades to clubs where I replaced full racks of older amps with just a few new class D apps and made those older sound systems sound better than new.

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It's not ideal and be better if it wasn't there. You look closely there's actually two frequencies floating around on those waveforms. One appears to be in the 48K region and the other is maybe 500k or something. Being that the amp is the last thing in the signal chain and nearly all audio high frequency drivers are incapable of reproducing anything over 30k, and the audio cabling we use does not transmit those high frequencies very well, and the impedance of the voice coils tends to go very high for high frequencies pretty much blocking those out completely anyway. Additionally class D amps have pretty strict low pass filters at 22k or so so they won't regenerate those frequencies if they get back into the input somehow. And yes it'd be cool if they weren't there and also the amount of electronics and filtering needed to make sure they're not on the output is probably more detrimental than leaving them

The fans were ramping up not because of the load as much as the pure high frequency I was driving into it. The class D amps have a hard time with long-term high power high frequency energy. Which is rarely a real world scenario as the high frequencies tend to be the least continuous and most transient. We've been using the smaller t604s on monitor rigs like the EAW microwedge systems we have and they perform very well for that. Classy amps tend to be very efficient and don't normally run much hotter when under full load than they are with no load.

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Yeah, about 1982. And "Daryl Martini the Cosmic Weenie" was on-air for WBCN Boston. My word, yesterday was a long time ago now. 🔈🔉🔊

@@TriAmpHiFi "I was so much older then, I'm much younger than that now."

The powersoft has built in processing that is set to protect the amp and prevent clipping from ever occuring

I we saw the opposite. We had louds of issues with the Crest amps. We now deploy literally 100s of L-acoustics LA48 and LA12x amps with very low failure rates, improved sound quality and volume levels that make the Crests sound broken

The new one is not an expander. It's more like a limiter where it lets all of the peaks through but the longer duration signals get compressed That said with normal music nothing gets compressed it just is louder lighter smaller and more powerful

A full 1/4 second is pretty long for a kick or snare spike. Also, it's important to know that the duration of the burst power rating increases when the amps has better input power. I was running it in worst case scenario with it on a longish 16 ga ac power cord plugged into a wall outlet. The amp can power from 120, 208, 240v on single phase or 3 phase ac. Better Ac will increase the pulse power durations. Also the amp harvests back EMF from reactive loads like speakers, so there's even more energy available in real world use. The amp works great in real world but I would not use this tiny singe rack space 4 channel amp as the optimal subwoofer amp. I would get it's beg brother, the X4 that does 5000 watts per channel x 4 in a single rack space

That high frequency fuzz is in the 50 kilohertz region I believe so it's neither audible nor can speakers reproduce it

That 4801 is a Class h

@@DaveRat I had no idea. Thanks for letting me know.

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Yes it's difficult to buy any gear at this point that doesn't have class D amps. All the self-powered gear and all the top end professional gear is based on Class D

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I've been trying to do tests and get more clarity on that. And even if I do gain headway the variations between manufacturers blur the outcome. What I found so far is that class D amps can sound really good and all things being equal in cost size weight, including the fidelity, you'd be hard pressed to find a class AB amp that outperforms Class D amps. I guess the question is with an unlimited budget buying the most expensive class A or Class A B amp, would you end up with something that sounds better than the most expensive Class D amp. And for that I would say yes. But as soon as you add in any other metric like size, weight, cost, efficiency, output power, or fidelity per dollar spent, everything seems to point to Class D being the winner Add in things like cool factor, aesthetics, and simplicity, and the outcome tilts more towards Class A or Class A B

@@DaveRat Thanks, and totally agree on all points. The "sounds better" thing is just so subjective to begin with, but wanted to hear your thoughts regardless. I've kind of come down to the conclusion that when the differences are small, I can't really tell what sounds better by a quick a/b. But I think I can tell something when I've lived with it for time, like say an hour, do I still think it sounds good, or is there something bugging me and I don't want to listen anymore. If I'm happy with something after say an hour, it sort of becomes a clear winner to me, but that is so subjective to any subconscious impulse, you can't really quantify why it's better or if it even is better. That's what I've arrived at these days, and obviously you've experienced a huge gamut of experience with not only different gear, but just time and different situations. So I pick your brain because I trust it. 😎 And thanks again. It's really interesting how you use your knowledge and imagination to teach and prove or disprove concepts. You should probably be the whacky professor that everyone loves. Anyway, really appreciated. 🙏

Agreed on the "over time, awareness to subtle differences can increase" these are the aspects I love to test!

@AdamGotheridge My experience is that the old-tech linear amps sound better in the upper mids and highs, but modern amps can sound better on the bass. Unless the bass is composed of sine waves... Perhaps oversampling will help class D amps rival linear amps high-frequency sound quality.

It was the 4601 that was designed and optimized for high frequency applications. The 4801 was the small brother to the 7001. The 8001 is the three rack space version with even more power and weight

It'd be interesting to try a class D app on those. I know the PowerSoft amps can run loads as low as 1/2 ohms and have the voltage swing to run high impedance loads and still deliver a good amount of power more so then class A B apps. It would seem the class D would be better suited for those complex loads but would we worth testing

For bass you want more continuous power so class ab performs well. But, getting big class D can still out perform the class ab for less weight and size. You just need a bigger class D amp if you're going to go that way but one that's still lighter than the class a B

@@DaveRat Thanks Dave. Good information. Despite the weight of the GK, I still like it’s tone shaping qualities more than the Acoustic Image amp. Modern Technology is a good thing!

So many variables and yeas, for a bass amp I would thing conventional would be more desirable. Better overload character as well

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Powersoft can do energy recycling from reactive loads (idk if all amps but the only I ordered does), so you'll get more power out of the amp than on a purely resistive load. Keep in mind that real power delivered to the speakers will be lower than apparent power (V*I). Some amps might get unstable at various low impedance/weird angle loads, but idk much about that since nobody really tests that and I haven't seen much data on that.

Yes, I will ponder a test for that

A/B comparison lol

That's the kind of thing that I post for channel members on the channel member Telegram account. I've got other files related to videos that I've posted there and if I get an ask from that side I would gladly post it

Here is the data sheet. I trust PowerSoft to release accurate data as they have always tested to spec and I know the designer Claudio. Look at the symmetrical and asymmetrical power specs to see how it performs with multiple channels driven www.powersoft.com/wp-content/uploads/datasheet/PS_TSeries_DS_EN.pdf

@@DaveRat Thanks for pointing out that detail!

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Having enough dynamic range is important. Anything that exceeds the capability of an older amp tends to manifest as clipping which is undesirable. That said having an amp that too much exceeds the speaker capabilities can result in damage to the speaker or undesirable sounds from the speaker. In general a class D app can offer more power, less weight, generate less heat, draw less power from the wall, while being smaller and outputting the same or more energy than conventional older amps

3db double watts, 6db 4x watts 10 db is 10 x the watts and 20 db is 100x the watts 10db is said to 2x the perceived volume level. Or 10x the watts to double the perceived Volume

@@DaveRat ohhhhh. I missed that detail. I would be really interested to learn how we measure perceived volume.

Yeah, I am not convinced it is as simple as they say. Adding 3 db to a system running 115db sounds significant and adding 3 db to a system running 90 db sounds irrelevant

@@DaveRat also frequency. Going from background dinner levels to cleaning levels I notice a significant increase in bass, so at least initially the bass grows louder first, though it levels off at very high volumes and is overtaken by the rest of the sound. Perhaps it's the level of tactile feel increases faster than the loudness of the tone due to the increased energy beyond the rate of increasing loudness. Although I tend to think those frequencies around 3kHz get louder the fastest. Adding 10dB to a 3kHz note sounds a much bigger change than adding it to 150Hz. The fletcher munson loudness curves are an interesting look up.

Efficiency as well I think. Large class D amplifier clusters can get louder for the same power consumed vs class AB.

They each have their advantages. Crusty amps can deliver really beautiful fast transience at very high levels and can also struggle with long extended bass notes. Class a B can sound smoother but they tend to fart and you need a lot of back muscle to move them around, they generate a lot of heat and use up a lot of power from the wall

The dummy load was running directly into a speaker and there wasn't really a need for an amp. You can just put a speaker across part of the load and the speaker will play the voltage drop that's showing on that load. So that's pretty much what you heard in the video

Ok I grabbed 2 sections of audio from the video with music playing through the 2 amps (not ideal with RU-vid but worth a shot). Looks like about 7dB difference over the sections. Does that sound about right?

Yes that sounds about right. The Crest amp puts out 400 watts and I was running it right near clip and the power soft amp puts out around 1600 Watts which is 4 times the power which is 60b.

The signal tells the amp what to do, the amp then tries to send it and the speaker then tried to do it. All is good until the signal exceeds the amp's capability to deliver. And amp with more peak capability will deliver the peaks, and amp without the peak capability will clip/distort. Same thing sort of with continuos except the powersoft amp has built in protection so it will never clip or distort, it just turns down things that are too much to deliver

Thanks. Didn’t know the body of the 3 paragraphs. That’s an ah ha moment. 🔊😁

Awesome!!

For home hifi, the fan less class ab is the way to go. If you need to move or transport it, or it needs to be small ao draw less power, class D all the way

@@DaveRat true, class d is for outdoor use for its efficiency and weight.

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It’s amazing the technology that has brought us these lightweight but powerful amplifiers. In the old days, amplifier manufacturers built huge power supplies so that the output devices had ample clean power available on their power rails. Then along came switching power supplies and their fast, clean, and efficient ICs that made huge heavy transformers and capacitors unnecessary. Finally, someone made the intellectual leap to in effect just modulate the power supply and the modern amplifier was born. I don’t think they sound as good for critical listening but hell a lot of modern music sounds like bad distortion and audio processing artifacts to begin with. So, I’ll still be over here with a nice warm sounding tube amp with the kinds of distortion I like and the kids can use the type they like and we will all be happy. All kidding aside, having humped more than a few old Flame Linear, Crown, and “modern” QSCs, the new amps are awesome. Not only are they lighter and much more dense, they take a fraction of the power supply. Add in the swap to modern lighting with moving effects, color swaps , and LEDs, you don’t need to run the massive cables to a couple thousand amps of 208 for lighting and a 100 plus amps for sound in an arena gig. Much less hang thousand of par cans. Vari-light won.

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As a close friend of the Claudio Lastrucci, look him up, who is the designer for PowerSoft, holds many patents and is an absolutely brilliant innovator, I can say that there is no snake oil involved with the powersoft designs. I've learned much from him and one of the challenges with amp design is helping people understand that they don't need a dump truck to run an F1 race. The concept that an amp must have the capability of delivering full power continuously over long periods of time in order to reproduce a signal that has a four to one or 10 to 1 peak to average ratio, is a challenge indeed. That said I too love old boat anchor poweramps for their posterity, simplicity and coolness. And also know that having switched from those boat anchor poweramps to modern class D apps we have seen astronomical improvements in sound quality, amazing reductions in weight and size, reduced power draw, reduced heat generation, increased reliability, improved sound quality and the ability to reproduce much higher volume levels than we were able to before. For a deployment like we do when supplying sound for Coachella where we have over 800 large format boxes and well over a million watts of power, it's incomprehensible in this day and age to deploy older format amps. As you may or may not know, All the top world class sound systems for concerts events and festivals all use Class D amps at this point in time with the exception of a few esoteric EDM companies that have cool sound systems powered by older amps

@@DaveRat I'm sure the designer is brilliant. It's their marketing department calling it a 6kW amp that are not. I mean, it could be, for a millisecond, and so can many other amps.

I don't think you can draw such a distinct line. The statement that the amp does not deliver 6,000 watts is an incorrect statement. The question is time frame. Perhaps using a car analogy may be helpful. If a dragster can't travel a hundred miles at its top speed is its top speed not valid, Even though it can reach the speed and it can be measured? Or is the only valid speed for a dragster the speed at which it can maintain for an extended period of time even though that is not how the dragster would ever be used? Since amplifiers tend to reproduce music which has short period bursts and are rarely used for long-term continuous signals, why would we hold the long-term continuous signal spec to be the valid spec rather than the short-term burst spec? That said not all short-term power specs are not equal and some manufacturers use very short periods of time while others use longer periods of time and there can be drastic sonic differences between the two. My experience is that powersoft does a very good job of using realistic parameters. And this is the crux of the test I did here. The amp claims to have 6 db more output power, and the test shows that it is 6 db louder and a conventional amp using music

@@DaveRat >The question is time frame. = which is exactly what I said. You can deliver a lot more power given a short enough time. The Crest will deliver it's claimed power all day long and will have headroom to handle peaks beyond that. I'm sure the other amp is great, just not at 6K Watts. The IEC C20 inlet connector on the amp is spec'd to 20A. The amp can operate from 90-250VAC input, but even at 250V@20A, that's 5kW. You can't output 6,400W for very long with a 5kW input. I appreciate the analogy and the rest of the comment.

And yet the PowerSoft amp is 6db louder with music than the 400 watt crest.. so the music is playing at 1600 Watts but not 1600 watts? Hmmm The Crest hand no more output at 8 ohms without clipping as ithe 400 watts matched it's supply voltage. But yes, at 4 and 2 ohms, the crest had has additional peak power to offer

Awesome thank you

At 8 ohms the crest continuous measurement and peak measurement were the same because the 400 watts into 8 ohms matched its power supply voltage. At four ohms and two ohms the crust had additional power capabilities When I did the peak power test I brought both amps to clipping in the same manner so we saw the peak power of both amps

@@DaveRat that’s what I was looking for, I missed that. Thanks!

That said you bring up a great point, at four ohms and two ohms the voltage supply rails of the crest remain the same because the voltage rails are the same. So the theoretical peak power limit of the crest is 800 w per channel at 4 ohms and 1600 w per channel at 2 ohms. At those lower impedances the output of the crest is more similar to the power soft and that it can deliver much higher power than its RMS rating for short periods of time.

Yes the peak power rating if it lasts long enough duration is the rating that matters. That said, if it only lasts 100 milliseconds it's not going to work as well as an amp that has a peak power rating that lasts 250 to 350 milliseconds. Also for long extended bass notes the continuous power rating of a higher level can be useful

Yes we run amps on 208 or 240 regularly. We run three phase to all our amp racks. Power sharing and harvesting back EMF into the power supply is common amongst power soft amps. In this demo since I only used one channel it demonstrated the maximum power. I do know that the limiting factor on the T-Series amplifiers is the power supply and with a bigger power supply it would be able to supply even more output. If memory serves, I recall powersoft telling me that the duration of the peak power is increased with a higher AC input voltage

that's exactly how these amps and other modern 4ch amps (e.g. lab fp10000q) are made to be used ;) their individual channel capability far exeeds that of their psu for all channels. But it's the ideal solution for small setups (e.g. 2 subs, 2 tops) or larger active multiway systems per side (e.g. sub/mid/hi/fill). also no one is playing pure sines, average crest factor for music is 12db+, so it becomes all about pumping out the peaks, not sustained load (except maybe subs in heavily compressed eectronic music) for full throttle sub uses there are beasts like the x4l

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It's really fun when you use the Powersoft X series in the EU, where they hook directly to 415V 3ph mains 😎

Yes!