Just a general amp question........

[big_ol_meat 10+ year member]

I've been away for a while. The last time I was around sounddomain was harping on RE and Adire. Termpro was all over DD. I see now it's Sundown as the new go to reference here. With the way cycles go it made me curious. I know true power isn't always the end all for amps but it's a basic principal.

Firs these are just random numbers. I'm just using the brands as a reference, not as a true watt to dollar format. I'm also basing off the 16 year old wanting quality SQL....with a little more reference to the SPL part. Let's be honest, almost everyone knew asking for advice comes looking to impress their friends.

If you have say a Hifonics amp that doesn't put out rated power of 1K watts,but is maybe 800 watts, that is 150 dollars and you have a Sundown amp that puts out more than it's 1K watts say, maybe 1300 watts, but is 550 dollars.......then you look and Hifonics has an amp that is rated for 1500 watts but might put a true 1300 out for 200 dollars, why would you choose the Sundown at almost 3 times the price?

Is build quality that big of a difference? And don't just subject this to class D's. Even do the same for front stage. I've always what I thought were middle of the pack amps (JL, older Fosgate, Xtant) and always wondered if I were paying for quality or mindset. I never competed.

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[ace_800 5,000+ posts]

IMHO build quality for the most part and being that the Hifonics or others like Audiopipe are mass manufactored amps with cheaper parts to keep the cost down.

 

[gunz4me2 10+ year member]

I'm generally willing to pay a premium for build quality or customer service and sadly, both are usually lacking when purchasing lower priced products. Going further, those same two qualities are lacking in some higher priced products too, so it really makes things tough on the consumer's purchasing decision process.

 

[mylows10 5,000+ posts]

my experience has been ,that the mass produced amps ,woofers ,etc... don't usually last as long ,they also get warm or even hot at time which also makes the life of the product shorter .i've seen woofers such as kicker cvr and L7's come brand new out of the box from the factory with broken tinsel leads and bad surrounds,i've also gotten amps with bad power supplies or mosfets straight from the sealed box.anyway what i'm trying too say is that since those products are mass produced it's very hard and time consuming to inspect every single object coming off the line ,so they are not doing so ,hence the issues i've had.with the higher end equipment ,they are inspecting all items before boxing and shipping,i've never had any bad customer service with any of the better company's, even stetsom,the end result is you pay for crap , you get crap.

 

[big_ol_meat 10+ year member]

I just base it the same way I would with a computer processor. If you compare say an AMD 940 to an i5, the i5 out performs it. But for cost it might be twice as much. So instead of basing off the same class, base it off price. You could get a top of the line AMD for an upper level Intel.

I guess mylows did a great job summing it up.