Re: Inadequate Sub Power For a Venue... Tips/Tricks/Help
Agreed about the bridging-except when you bridge 2 1000 watt amps you get 4000 watts-6dB voltage gain (into the same impedance-assuming it is within the limits of the amps).
Yes, but the concept of two bridged power amp outputs combining power is valid.
But the times I have heard people say this they were just talking about running the output of one amp into another.
understood (or should i say misunderstood).
Yes some amps can "take" the output of another-but you are still limited by the "power" of the second amp. The first one adds nothing to the total capability.
Yup... but sometimes adding an amp to say a powered mixer, this could actually be a useful mode of operation.
That capability went away with the modern electronic balanced inputs, that don't have a passive attenuator across the input. (I did one amp with a balanced passive attenuator across it's input, but the attenuator kill of that topology approach was inferior, so i didn't expand it into other models.)
Totally agreed about making Peavey gear hard to fail with. But I have had people INSIST that I remove an autograph (that was only being used as an RTA-not the system eq) from the rack because-as they put it-"Peavey gear contaminates the ground-even when it is turned off". WOW the stuff people believe and don't have a clue about-but they still keep on "preaching it".
You don't need to tell me about that,,, I lived it for 15 years.
My personal favorite is the CS800. It was designed so that you could drive it into a dead short all day and not kill it (till it thermally shut down) but it would come back.
in fact that was the test for a repair-short the output and drive it into full clip until it overheated. Then remove the short after it cooled down and if it still worked you did a good repair.
In fact that is standard practice in the factory when building the amps to short them while in the burn-in rack to confirm the protection features all work.
That came straight from the Peavey repair center and I did that that test many times. It was designed so that "stupid musicians" could hook up as many speakers as they wanted and they could not kill the amp and it would keep on making sound and not have relays that disconnected the speakers. Yes the power would drop way down-but the amp would not die
That was not really an intended use. Peavey was not first in the market to push 2 ohm operation and Peavey sold the auto-match auto-formers so customers could match speaker loads to the optimal design load for the amps.
I recall one discussion with Jack Sondermeyer (the father of the CS800) about an obscure low impedance approach for small installed sound systems. Instead of stepping up to 70/100V and adding step down transformer at each speaker. One auto-match steps down the amp output to be happy driving 1 ohm loads, and then you hang a bunch of 8 ohm speakers in parallel. Of course the wire losses are higher, so not appropriate for very long speaker runs, but cheap and not so dirty for small background music or installed systems.
The hard to blow up amps, saved many a gig, when a system lost one amp and finished with the speakers doubled up on the working amp. It would usually work if you didn't press your luck thermally, and weren't already overloading the amps.
To me THAT is a good design. Hats off to the designers. They understood their market and what the "typical customer" would do equipment.
The important thing was to keep working day after day. Not work really good sometimes and constantly break down.
And in the ol' days, when Peavey gear needed repair-it was pretty inexpensive to repair. I am not sure about these days.
I was working at Peavey when we abandoned the IC sockets and that was perhaps the beginning of the end for cheap easy repairs, but FWIW opamps had become so reliable that with the exception of inputs and outputs opamp failures in the middle of the boards didn't require much attention. The shift to SMD technology was the last nail in the coffin.
It is too expensive to build product not using SMD today, but not as easy to repair as old school through hole.
JR
