Arc Audio 4150XXKs Getting Hot and Shutting Down!

[johntharkins 10+ year member]

I don't understand it...I have (2) Arc Audio 4150XXK amplifiers, as well as a Monitor 1 MKII 4.70 and all amps are getting hot and shutting down. I have a Clarion DRZ9255 deck and all amps are at minimum gain. There is also an Optima Yellowtop battery within a foot of all amplifiers. What's really weird is the Arcs will shut down before the Monitor and the Arc amps are fan cooled and the Monitor is not. One 4150XXK has both front and rear channels bridged on the midbass speakers from a Boston Z6 component set. The other 4150XXK has half of it bridged on a JL Audio 8W7 and the other 2 channels are running the tweeters from the Boston Z6 set mentioned above. Last but not least the Monitor 1 MKII 4.70 has the front and rear channels bridged running a Boston Pro 6.5 component set.

Any ideas? I've been running a similar setup to this for years except with a Soundstream Van Gogh VGA320.4 and a VGA500.4 and I never had any heat issues with those amplifiers and they weren't even fan cooled. All I did was replace the Soundstreams with the Arc Audio amplifiers and added the Monitor amp to run the rear 6.5s because I wanted to try bi-amping the Z6s. If I listen at a low level the amps never shut down but as soon as I turn the volume up the amps will shut down within 15 to 20 minutes. The Soundstream amps never shut down on me once in the 8 years or so that I had them running almost the exact same setup.

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[johntharkins 10+ year member]

Oh yeah the Monitor 1 amp doesn't have a crossover and I'm not using the crossovers on the ARC amps because my Clarion DRZ9255 is supplying all the processing and crossover points for my components and subwoofer.