Nothing succeeds like excess and in the heady bassalicious world of Hair Tricks and bass competitions like the bonkers ‘How Low Can You Go’ Propper Droppers contest format – the mere 150dB thing is so 20th century nowadays. For while we still lag behind the Yanks, with their V8 power to run six big alternators at once, we do have cars that will do 160dB of real, full range music and literally make girls have involuntary orgasms (and no I’m not joking). Anyway, to do all that, you need amps like this. So now you know.
CLASS D POWEEEEER!
There are different ways of making proper wattage with a signal and twelve volts or so of DC juice. A bit like the difference between petrol and diesel or even V-series, rotary or four-pot engines, they all have their pros and cons. But Class D, like this one, is all about a ‘switching power supply’ which makes best use of all the electricity you have. A ‘normal’ or class A/B amp is sweet but not too efficient, making lots of heat. The class D thing can be over 90% good stuff only. It means you can make yet MORE POWER.
WHERE THE WATTS COME FROM
With just ONE of these monster watt makers, you will absolutely require a ‘Big Three’ huge fatty power wire upgrade under your bonnet, at least two extra batteries for each one of these amps you run, with two big thick power feeds of one-over-gauge cable of high copper content wire to each amp, just to keep it well supplied with the good stuff it needs to shake your best friend’s sister’s punani. And this amp is real-world. It’ll not brew up and die if your voltage goes too low, it is made to cope with around 12 volts, rather than demanding 14.
DROP YOUR AMP GUTS
Amps this crazy tend to like to show off their underclangers for all to see. Some makers, like Phoenix Gold, have even been known to make amps with clear bases, so you can ooh and aaah at their loveliness. To be a high-power car amp, it needs a bucket of capacitance – that is the squadron of little can-shaped items. It also needs doughnut shaped coils of wire. These are the power supply and more and fatter-wired is better, always. This is crammed with both. The big old slab of heatsink also has a really large number of the watt making MOSFET things – that look like tiny black plastic handbags with three legs, stuck to the metal with heatsink gloop to conduct the hotness away.
SHEER GRUNT
The really cool one is HOW MANY WATTS MISTER? So…
Power @ 4 Ohm (CEA*): 1 x 1,200 W
Power @ 2 Ohm (CEA*): 1 x 2,400 W
Power @ 1 Ohm (CEA*): 1 x 4,000 W
WHAT’S A CEA RATING?
The CEA rating thing is a brilliant idea from America and means a GENUINE and meaningful muscle rating. It came in because of too much bullshit being printed on boxes. Only the best makers happily adopted the CEA rating system. Basically, the more coils of badass woofers that an expert who knows the Majicke of IMPEDANCE hooks up to these amps, (that’s all that stuff about ‘Ohms’ by the way) the more watts you can suck out of them.
Price £699.99
For more info see Ground Zero Audio
Review by Adam Rayner
