home amplifer to boost receiver amplifier

Re: home amplifer to boost receiver amplifier

First, are those really subs or just woofers as part of 3-way speaker?

If your 3rd sub is also passive, how are you powering it?

Manufacturer and model numbers will help us better determine what you need. But just adding 500w won't do anything positive unless you add it to the correct speaker(s).

-Robert

Re: home amplifer to boost receiver amplifier

How are you crossing everything over? Without a passive crossover, your final impedance may be too low and you can fry your receiver.

This is a woofer - link. It's make to play as part of a 2 or 3 way speaker. Exactly what you described below. By design, it will play frequencies higher than a sub. It will not play as low as a sub though. This is a sub - link. It's designed to play low. 100hz and lower usually. It also has a lot more excursion. That's how much the cone moves. The cone of a woofer can move 3 or 4 mm each direction. The sub I linked to can move 38mm each direction. That means it can move a LOT more air.


How do you know they require more power? Just because a driver says 100w (or 200w or 1,000w) doesn't mean you can feed it that much. That's just how much power it can take (usually at 1,000hz) before the voice coil melts. You have to take into account program material, enclosure size and tuning frequency and power to determin how much power a driver can really take. That Pioneer driver I linked to above would destroy itself if it were powered by a 100 clean watts at 20hz in a medium to large sized box.


Yes, your receiver would power your tweeters but how would you cross everything over? It's like you want to run a bi-amped active system but want to use a receiver to power the highs. It doesn't work that way. You need to choose one or the other.

I recommend you use your receiver to power your main speakers and get a real sub amp to power the ther woofer you have. Later you can upgrade from to a real sub driver. You don't need one that's as large as the one I linked to. But a driver designed to play in the appropriate frequency range will sound much better than one playing outside of it's design.

-Robert

Re: home amplifer to boost receiver amplifier

plate sub amps - These need to be mounted in an enclosure. Either the one that the "sub" is in or build one for it. Pro amps - The most power for the money. They normally have a loud fan that can be replaced with a quieter one (not a computer fan!). I run the Behringer EuroPower EP2500. That pushes 1,100w into each of my 15" subs.

You mentioned that you have three 8 ohm drivers. How are you going to wire them to a mono amp? All 3 in parallel will yeild a 3.2 ohm load. The plate amps won't drive that without overheating and shutting down.

Yes it plays but you are not getting the optimum sound quality from it.

We try a deal with absolutes here. Going from 40w to 300w will give you about an 8db increase in sound not taking power compression into account. That's almost twice as loud. To get 10 times as loud, you would have had to use about 20,000w. Remember, the db scale is logrithmic.

I'm not going to say that you picked the wrong forum but the wrong guy may have started answering your question. I'm going to give you my opinion if you are doing something that will not give you good results. And what you are doing not only will not give you good results but it is a waste of money. If you don't like it, put me on ignore. After 7 years and 2,668 posts on this forum it will be the first time.

If you have done this enough you would know that 75% of the Best Buy employees are not trained enough. And the technical knowledge at Radio Shack is a joke.

But you mentioned earlier about a sub amp. Using your receiver as a pre-amp and just sending more power to your speakers will take a full range amp. The Behringer A500 or the Behringer EP1500 are both good cadidates for this. The 1500 has more power but the fan issue I mentioned earlier. And it will destroy your speaker if you turn it up too loud. It is that powerful.

-Robert

Re: home amplifer to boost receiver amplifier

IMO you could buy a stereo amp and run a sub off of each side. Crown still makes big wattage amps for a reasonable price but you really don't need more than 100 wpc because that's what you're speakers are rated for. You would need to feed both stereo channels the signal from your sub jack on your current receiver. I would suggest using an EQ between the sub out and an in jack stereo amp so that you could be sure you weren't amping anything more than 100hz or so if you want a true sub setup. You would have to limit the volume of a Crown probably to keep from blowing your speakers because a 300 wpc amp is a lot of amp and Crown makes plenty of those. So do a lot of other companies but it will likely cost you more money. Still you should be able to work out just how much you could push your subs without blowing them with a Crown IMO. You just need to develop an ear for distortion because most speakers will distort before they blow.

If you really want a power pushing amp that will play everything you throw at it down to 20hz find yourself a Kenwood Basic M2 and you'll never want for bass power again. It's 300wpc at 4 ohms and it will drive drivers all day long and never even break a sweat. It has a huge heat sink and it comes with it's own cooling fan. Plus it has the ability to shut itself off if you do push it too hard (which is very unlikely). They haven't been made in almost 20 years but they are still around and kicking out bass because they were built to take it.

It would obviously be better to use sub drivers that could handle the kind of power you're talking about though.

You could actually use any 100wpc receiver as a dual channel sub amp. You just run the signal through the receiver and power the subs with it.

You could also buy separate PA amps to push your sub. They aren't nearly as clean at higher frequencies but they will generally do to push a sub. IMO you don't need a real accurate amp to push a sub if you just want ground pounding bass.

You could do this sort of thing a lot of ways but IMO it would be best to have some true full range speakers as your front channel speakers so you can get smooth bass without gaps in the frequency curve. IMO subs should only be used to complement full range speakers. I know that isn't a popular position to take these days but I have been doing this kind of thing for about 35 years. I have been the sound manager for a couple of bands (one of which was very successful) and I have worked with several others. I was offered a job running a recording studio back in the early 80's when you didn't see one in everyone's basement. It was for a company that produced acts for Vegas and Atlantic City casinos. I do video production now so I still have to keep up on audio issues.

I wouldn't say I'm an expert or anything like that but I've been around sound equipment quite a long time. I know what I think sounds ok. And IMO you can't use 5 bookshelf speakers and a sub and get a smooth distribution of sound throughout the frequency spectrum. But that's just my opinion. Of course others will likely disagree. As always YMMV. My son is an electrical engineer who's working on his phd in electro-optical physics. All his engineering buddies are big into sound equipment. He tells me my system sounds better than any of theirs and I built mine out of what many would consider outdated and possibly second rate equipment but some people judge before they listen. It's not about what the magazines say or what stuff costs. It's about how it sounds.

Re: home amplifer to boost receiver amplifier

Sorry about the extra post.

Re: home amplifer to boost receiver amplifier

WOW