Passive vs. Active Cooling

[keep_hope_alive Premium Member]

MTX purchased xtant for their cooling technology. So add them to the list. They also purchased Streetwires for their terminals.

MTX are decent amps, for the price. Lots of good technology inside them and a long history.

 

[BnGRacing 10+ year member]

MTX purchased xtant for their cooling technology. So add them to the list. They also purchased Streetwires for their terminals.
MTX are decent amps, for the price. Lots of good technology inside them and a long history.

Mitek purchased Xtant and ruined the company. Having owned almost a dozen Xtant amps (pre-Mitek) and EQs in my days, there's absolutely no technology shared between the two companies.

The old Xtant amps are actually very similar to the old PPI art amps (same designer). They're more robust but less user friendly. Personally, I like them a lot better than the PPI stuff. When Mitek purchased Xtant, the model numbers had a letter before the number (X603). These amps were not reliable at all. The lower line Xtant amps, a-series, were repackaged MTX amps with no thermostat controlled fans. Just a heatsink on one side.

There's no 'cooling technology' to sell. It was a row of fins with a fan blowing on them and these cooling systems have not been used in any Mitek product that didn't have an Xtant sticker on the chrome.

MTX:

Xtant:

One has 2 fans kinda glued on and the other has a fan blowing thru the fins of the sink. Guess which is which.

One has bipolar output devices and the other used MOSFET outputs. Guess which is which.

They look similar, but they're not...

 

[dipitydoo 10+ year member]

if i remember correctly, when both xtant and mtx came under the mitek umbrella, mtx advertised some of their amps with 'xtant cooling technology'. perhaps not exactly the same, but it looks like a variation. neither look like some great innovative technology, but they both appear to be very good designs. ideally, they would be better if they output the hot air through a clear opening, instead of small holes or some covers that impede the output of hot air, done for the sake of cosmetics. harmon kardon's old school tc series amps had a great fan design. very similar to the these, with a big 'tunnel' of aluminum in the middle, and a fan mounted directly to the chassis to blow the hot air unobstructed towards the outside. i've seen plenty of bad fan designs on amps, though. ppi's power class series, and mtx's black gold series had horrible fan designs, to the point of being almost useless. hard to imagine what some of these designers were thinking, its not that difficult to design a good properly designed fan cooled system in an amp.

 

[keep_hope_alive Premium Member]

One has 2 fans kinda glued on and the other has a fan blowing thru the fins of the sink. Guess which is which.
One has bipolar output devices and the other used MOSFET outputs. Guess which is which.

They look similar, but they're not...

the MTX fans are screwed in place and sealed, they exhaust air out of the heat sink channel (air blows up in your pic) which ***** air in through the sides. this is more efficient cooling than blowing into a heat sink channel. blowing into a heat sink is much less effective than exhausting air out of the heat sink since the air is evenly distributed across all heat sinks in the channel with exhaust and unevenly distributed when you blow. your xtant amp example is even worse since it exhausts inside the amp case. my 403a and 3300c amps at least had the channel on the outer edge which kept debris off the board - but the fan isn't sealed against the heat sink. it just sits there, held with a single bar. far from ideal. i add a seal and turn the fan around to improve cooling.

MTX improved the xtant cooling design. your pics above prove that.

many pre-mitek xtant amps are in need of additional cooling. like the 3300c which suffered from power supply components that were not on the heat sink yet commonly overheated and failed. xtant had great ideas but poor quality control and they still cut costs. like 50V caps on a 63V supply rail. granted, the frequency response and THD were much less desirable after the Mitek purchase.

MTX makes some decent amps. they have entry level lines that aren't special or desirable. but they do some things quite well, their nicer amps are just fine.

 

[Rich B 5,000+ posts]

if i remember correctly, when both xtant and mtx came under the mitek umbrella, mtx advertised some of their amps with 'xtant cooling technology'. perhaps not exactly the same, but it looks like a variation. neither look like some great innovative technology, but they both appear to be very good designs. ideally, they would be better if they output the hot air through a clear opening, instead of small holes or some covers that impede the output of hot air, done for the sake of cosmetics. harmon kardon's old school tc series amps had a great fan design. very similar to the these, with a big 'tunnel' of aluminum in the middle, and a fan mounted directly to the chassis to blow the hot air unobstructed towards the outside. i've seen plenty of bad fan designs on amps, though. ppi's power class series, and mtx's black gold series had horrible fan designs, to the point of being almost useless. hard to imagine what some of these designers were thinking, its not that difficult to design a good properly designed fan cooled system in an amp.