Digital Amps - Your opinions and why so few?

Eldartford, what was your experience with break-in on these amps?....how much time do they need and what kind of changes/improvement occur in the first 30 hrs or so?

Also, what do you do with speaker cables, are yours banana terminated or do you use an adaptor?

I picked up a pair of the ZR1600's and have about 5 hrs on them so far.
I'm using a Cardas banana to spade adaptor but it doesn't make a really good contact.

I shouldn't form an opinion with only a few hours on them, but my initial reaction is that these amps are very good for the money, but are not really the 'giant killers' that people are suggesting....perhaps they just need another 20 hrs or so.

Thanks

Rooze

Rooze...I understand that you are operating the amps bridged (1600 watts!). You should realize that each channel is operating into 2 ohms, and while the amp is built to withstand this environment, I think that fidelity is somewhat degraded relative to what it will do into 4 or 8 ohms. I suggest that you experiment with using only one stereo amp for the pair of speakers, and compare with bridged results.

In the long run, I think that you might do better to use the amps in a biamp configuration using an electronic crossover. That is what I do. One channel drives a subwoofer system, and the other the associated MG1.6.

I am not a great believer in breakin, and never performed the kind of listening (the same recording over and over again) needed to detect an effect. If they improve with use, hey...that's great. My cables are also nothing special. The sunwoofers and the woofer of the (2-way) MG1.6 are wired with generic #12 wire, with no terminations on either end. Bare wire, clampred into the binding post, which IMHO is the best way to do it unless you need to disconnect and reconnect the speakers frequently. The MG1.6 high end is biwired with deliberately small #24 wire. This gives me a 1 ohm resistance in the wire so that I don't need to use any tweeter padding resistor in the crossover. The MG 1.6 crossover is, by the way, modified with a large aircore inductor and fancy capacitors.

Of course the modification shops claim that this amp can be significantly improved, for a price. Since you have two, and really only need one, why not send one off for a mod, and see what difference it really makes. If you do go to biamp, you could use the modified amp for the high end, and stick with the stock amp for the lows.

Hopefully your running them in the bypass mode.Using the attenuators puts the amplifiers in a protection mode.It degrades the signal quite badly.

Good Luck!

AudioEng:The PC I thought brought up the performance somewhat and the synergy between speakers is paramount to getting exceptional sound.

What area's of modding have the most Impact to changing the characther?

Panny - an improved after-market power cord is beneficial. There is no "synergy" with this amp. If you have good speakers, they will sound good with this amp. This amp will drive any speaker well.

The mods that I do improve:
1)output filtering stages
2) op-amps - by eliminating 8 and replacing with 3
3) power delivery to both the remaining op-amps and Tri-path module

All of these I feel are necessary.

Steve N.
Empirical Audio
Manufacturer