Can someone give me some info on this old Optimus amp?

[amprepairman 10+ year member]

I have at least 5 of them..they are 2 ohm stable but I wouldn't recommend running it at 2 ohm's and they were made by Majestic...Majestic made that line of radio shack amps-it was also available in black-not as a option but depending on when it was made as they made it in both versions just at different times. I have several of them in both colors and I also have the Majestic version and they are clones-I'm not going to argue as to who made radio shacks amps..but they made those and I have some other ones made by Craig with radio shacks name on them and I have the Craig versions as well.. and while we are on the subject Pyramid did in fact make a power booster type amp with a 7 band EQ and I.C. front outputs with transformer rears that radio shack sold for awhile too-it was originally a Craig product it was 15 per channel front and 35 per rear I was fixing those when I was15 or16 and I"m 42 now so that was 26 to 27 years ago.Majestic was a pretty cool company and for the money made some very durable amps..they usually put out the 4 ohm rating but never kept up with the 2 ohm rating and ran really hot at 2 ohms but I really liked them. They were distributed in the Missouri area through Ed Roher radio. He went out of business and so did the original Majestic. Someone else sells the brand now but it's only the name..not the same amps.Later when I opened up my own car stereo shop I sold them till we couldn't get them any more. I did service for Radio Shack in the early 90's when they attempted to start up a service center and I got all kinds of B stock stuff from them..I still have it all in my storage unit.. Every now and then I see them(the majestic version) on ebay

 

[justafifteen 10+ year member]

Thanks for all that info amprepairman

I had some free time after school today and decided to hook the amp up. I ran new speaker wire to my front speakers (which was the biggest pain in the *** ever), soldered them onto the speakers, and ran the wires to my amp. I hooked up the power, ground, remote, and RCA's and turned my car on... and bad news. Lots and lots of engine/ignition noise. Even when the car is on Accessory, the speakers still pop and thump and hiss even with the volume at 0. I am using the same power, ground, and remote wires that I used for my old sub amp which I have now sold. Just to be safe, I double-checked my ground wire and it's perfect. I tried a second pair of RCA's but no luck. The last thing to check is the ground on the head unit, but that hasn't been touched for months, before I even sold my old amp so it couldn't have gotten messed up. And, the noise stops when I unhook the RCA's. I'm feeling like the amp is just broken. Also, sound only comes out of my front left speaker, nothing comes out of the right one. Can anyone give me some advice? Should I just sell the amp if I can or return it? Or can this be fixed without something like a "noise reducer"?

I've tried separating the power & RCA's from each other by a few feet, still nothing. I'm going to post this in a new thread too, so that it gets some more attention.

 

[amprepairman 10+ year member]

the noise reducer will screw up your sound quality to the point where you might as well play your MP3 with headphones...The amp might have a cooked rca ground in it..it was pretty common when the amp lost ground it would try to ground through the rca's and burn the ground on the board also might need the rca's and other stuff resoldered ...like I said they ran hot as hell when loaded down I'd try to return it to whoever u bought it from..I really don't think the amps worth sending to a shop for repair

 

[subzero 5,000+ posts]

I had one of those... and I had the eq you mentioned. and possibly a few other radio shack car audio crap. Memories... haha.