Why are they doing this?


Kinda vague, huh? I'll elaborate. I have Emotiva XPA-1 monoblocks driving Magnapan 20.7's. Before that they were powering Mag 3.7's. They are 1000 watts into 4ohms. They never clipped. I did play them loud but not ridiculously loud. These amps have blue led meter lights that move in sync with the amp output and they would peak a little passed halfway. Occasionally a bit higher. Recently I added a pair of REL G2 subwoofers. They are connected one left and one right as per the manual. That would be to the speaker posts on the amps with the supplied neutrik cable. Upon connecting the subs, the blue led's no longer move. (Yes, I've checked the switch that turns these on and off) Also, three times now, the amps have clipped, once left channel and twice right channel. It was at a pretty good volume but not where it was outrageous. I talked to a tech at Emotiva and first off, he had no knowledge of REL subs and how they are connected. After I explained it he was kinda at a loss for words having obviously never heard of connecting subs to the speaker posts on the amps. His explanation for what was happening was that the subs are 4ohm and the 20.7's are 4ohm so that's driving the load down to 2ohms and that's causing the clipping and the amps cannot detect 2ohms so that's why the led's are not functioning. If this is true then Rel subs cannot be used with any 4ohm speaker or the same problem will occur. I'll be honest, when you start talking ohms splitting and other electronic stuff I tend to get lost. Anybody care to take a stab at this?

mrschret
I'm pretty sure I can explain what is happening.

First, the person you spoke with does not know what he is talking about. The amplifier does not see the 4 ohm or whatever impedance of the sub's driver. It sees the input impedance of the sub's amplifier, which is many thousands of ohms (100,000 ohms for the high level input of many of the REL subs), which is therefore a completely negligible load.

The problem is almost certainly that you are connecting the sub's ground to the negative output terminal of the amplifier. The XPA-1 is a fully balanced amplifier, and its negative output terminal therefore drives a signal, rather than being grounded. From the manual for the XPA-1:
DO NOT connect the negative (-) speaker terminal of the XPA-1 to ground, or to the negative speaker terminal of another amplifier. (Do not connect the XPA-1 to any speaker which requires connections between the left and right speakers.) The XPA-1 is a fully differential amplifier and the negative speaker terminal is NOT at ground potential. Connecting the negative speaker terminal of the XPA-1 to ground, or to the negative speaker terminal of another amplifier (including another XPA-1) will cause damage to the XPA-1 or your other equipment.
What you should do is to connect the red and yellow wires of the Neutrik cable to the + output of the amp, and connect the black wire to a circuit ground point on the amp. A way to do that, if you are using the amp's balanced XLR input (and its RCA input is therefore unused), would be to obtain an RCA plug, solder the black wire to the ground sleeve connection of that plug (while leaving the center pin unconnected), and insert that plug into the amp's RCA input connector.

Regards,
-- Al
Post removed 
Elizabeth, you probably posted before seeing my post just above. I always have great respect for your inputs, but in this case you are not correct. REL subs (and many others) often provide high level inputs that are designed to be driven from power amplifier outputs. And that is commonly done in high quality systems. As I indicated above, in those situations the main power amplifier will see the (very high) input impedance of the sub's amplifier, not the low impedance of the sub's driver.

I'm quite certain that the explanation of the problem that I provided is correct.

Best regards,
-- Al