Crown amps

My personal take is that they sound fine. Note this is based on only a weekend of listening to a Crown K2.

I rented it to evaluate for subwoofer duty but just for fun, I connected it to some speakers I have - Definitive Tech BP-30 and Paradigm Studio 100v2. The results were much better than I had expected given the stigma surrounding them in some circles. The clarity and seemingly limitless power were amazing (keep in mind the K2 is 500 wpc).

When/if my old Yamaha amps ever fail and it's not economically feasible to repair them, I will be seriously considering pro amps.

I didn't mention before but I have a QSC amp that I bought strictly for use as a subwoofer amp. Just for laughs I hooked it up full range to good speakers and took a listen. The joke was on me. It sounded so good that I looked up the specs (which I hadn't paid much attention to) and found that they were in all ways comparable to home audio amps. The QSC does have a fan which makes it too noisy to use in the listening room (my amps are in the cellar) and it is not digital so it gets hot and needs the fan.

As the saying goes..."Don't judge a book by its cover".

12-12-06: Whoaru99, & Tony3d..
#1 The K2 is a world of a different amp, and it is AWESOME, due to no FAN, Big Power, Very little power draw, ZERO heat, and it is very liquid smooth and compact... This is nothing Like the Other Crown we are talking about which if you note above the K series was mentioned by me as being a better choice, however the Carver z series is very similar I believe but still has a Fan..

I have never used a Crown pro amp, but have a power line 3 which was in there last home system line of equipment.
It is called multimode which switches from class A to class B and to Class AB. I have been happy with the sound of the amp and compared to former amps of this era I would rate it high.

I heard a Crown Macro Reference (as I vaguely recall) at an air show: the sound was incredibly loud out on the airfield, and standing about 100 yards away from the speakers; but if you're looking for detail, precision, and accuracy, you might consider alternatives to pro. audio. Not sure what speaker load you're driving, but I read a review that the Crown Macro Reference -- "which should have been able to drive just about anything in the universe" -- choked at the load that Sound Lab A-1's presented; yet, a pair of 225 watt monoblocks did an impeccable job comparatively.

The Crown XTI 2000 puts out an amazing 2000 watts @ 2 ohms, but then again can it and will it in fact drive the suffocating loads of an electrostat setup -- if this is what you have -- or will the overload lights go bonkers as apparently occurred with the Macro Reference's attempt at driving the A-1's. Although Crown is a world-reknown Company with a dominant presence in arena type settings, it would be interesting to see and feel a crowd's reaction to relatively more precise amplification by Threshold, Krell, Levinson, VTL, Classe, MBL, etc. If these manufacturers can build machines that drive two ohms or less, I wonder how these machines would fare driving much less exhausting eight ohm pro speakers. I'm a relative novice at this stuff, hence the many wonders.