Pure Class A amps above 100 Watts?
My Gryphon Colosseum draws 500w while idling. I don’t idle, meaning, letting it run without signal, so that is no worry to me, lol. I can’t see how any Class A amp can draw only a few watts when the point of Class A is that the transistors are on all the time. Once ConEd installs smart meters, I’ll get to see how much my monster draws. I know it’s not going to be pretty. |
My Gryphon Colosseum draws 500w while idlingMy water cooled one I built, drew over 2500w at idle, with 230v mains, and had a special h/d power point, as the normal 10amp ones use to get hot and give connection problems over time. When this beast was switched on with the 5kva transformer, 45A bridges, 1/2 farad of supply caps, the mains wire from house barge board to the street pole used to flex up and down 6" for a second. This amp ran my Acoustat 1+1 https://i.ebayimg.com/00/s/MTYwMFg5MDA=/z/bkAAAOSwlddc1IW9/$_1.JPG crossed over passive 18db at 80hz to two very rare Kef B1814’s in 11cu ft vented sub enclosures that Neville Thiel (rip) designed for me after measuring the B1814’s, the system ended up flat to 18hz. http://i66.tinypic.com/nnr1fr.jpg Cheers George |
Haha, George, what a trip! Thanks for sharing that information. Do you have any pictures of that water cooled amp? Nothing succeeds like excess. I owned a Mac computer that was water/liquid cooled. It weighed a ton. How much did your amp weigh? I guess you wouldn’t want your water cooling system to spring a leak, would you? I’m terrified of anybody approaching my Colosseum with a drink in their hand, a fear shared by my friend who runs the Mephisto Solo mono blocks. |
larrykell OK you asked for it, believe it or not time. Sorry no pics, young and stupid back then, all I wanted was was biggest Class-A I could make using water as cooling, after I built and heard Nelson Pass A20 http://www.firstwatt.com/pdf/art_classa_20.pdf also they were film cameras back then and no internet so pics were a hassle. It weighed a lot, and was a two man lift in the order of 100kg, that power supply fed some for memory 36x Hirel EB and ED 204 bjt transistors 20amp 200w 200mhz each, one of the best transistors eve made, no longer available. The amp was on a naked platform 1mt X 1/2mt, which had a machined water cooling jacket which all those hirel’s bolted to the outlet hose went to the top of a small car radiator, the bottom hose of the radiator went to a very quiet pump which then went to the inlet of the water cooling jacket. I had a Garard turntable motor with a Davis Craig plastic fan on it turning at 33 rpm to blow air through the radiator. The whole thing after 10 years started to corroded, I very rich businessman offered me a fortune for it as a resto project and I sold it to him, he may still have it, but I doubt it, even the 1/2 farad of caps were on the way out. I was a trip making it a showing it off, one of the times it powered Otto Majors system (rip) Quad 57 restorer extraordinaire even better than original. He had double stacked quad 57’s with Decca Kelly ribbons from 10khz up, and from 100hz down two 24" Hartly woofers in the wall where the room behind it was the speaker box. Front end was a Linn of course with an Infinity Black Widow arm and a Stax Electrostatic!!!! best ever sounding cartridge, going into it’s own power supply and riaa, which then went into my Lightspeed Attenuator MkI passive and into the water cooled beast! What a sound, remember the Dire Straits album "Love Over Gold" very well it was holographic!!. http://mniec.files.wordpress.com/2012/11/hqdusa_resize.jpg?w=594&h=413 https://i.pinimg.com/originals/ff/28/0e/ff280e10ff8268ed43348aa59b805d2a.jpg https://farm8.staticflickr.com/7479/16018366265_aeda7012db_b.jpg https://www.vinylengine.com/turntable_forum/viewtopic.php?t=23803 Cheers George |
