a dyno review of 62-65% effiency at 2ohm to 8ohm range
Efficiency always has high and low points and expecting the test bench numbers in real-world applications is just silly. Mostly that stuff is meaningless or at least not terribly important IMO. I mean sure, let's not go back to class A/B but anything in the class D realm is fine.... you're either running low power on stock or mostly stock electrical or you should be going for overkill. With today's alternator and battery options and how cheap power is there's absolutely no reason to plan a big build and cheap out there.
Barevids repairs amps, at first he didnt like full bridges several years back but as the new tech comes out, he likes them a lot more and believes they are the future.
Nobody ever disliked full bridge I think. Mmats has been doing it for ages and their amps don't have a reputation for high failure rate or anything else bad apart from being expensive due to being engineered and manufactured in Florida. The thing to note with many of his videos on the subject is where he will find some flaw in the design or cheap component that caused failure. Most of his "these are great amps" comments have a caveat like: provided every MOSFET is within a very precise tolerance or once some component is upgraded.
We may be seeing a point where it's going to be less costly for manufacturers to just crank them out for super cheap and eat whatever warranty return claims than it would be to make costly revisions and component upgrades. Again, I'm really interested to see how Sundown handles his Chinese built full bridge and see where Zenon and other Korean build houses do as the "brands" who buy from them start getting into their full bridge offerings.
The smart series has very good potential but it's relatively new so we don't know if it's a good long-term choice
At the price it almost doesn't even matter if it only survives a little bit longer than the warranty. They're priced to be pretty much disposable. Now that said, having to deal with warranty/return/downtime might be more trouble than the savings is worth for someone and this sort of thing should be considered when buying new.... pick a dealer who you know will take care of you or buy on
eBay or
Amazon with a third party warranty and don't be surprised if you get a dud and have to replace one or two before you get a winner because it's not unheard of.
Sort of reminds me of the Brazilian Taurus pistols. Some people love them, some people get bad ones but after they send it back to the company on warranty it comes back (several months later) as really nice. I tried one and it was really sketchy, would drop the magazine out sometimes when firing. I did not want to wait to send it back to the company for service (which by all accounts would have made it really nice) but instead made my dealer take it back and give me credit towards something American made that worked out of the box first try and that I wouldn't have to worry about.
I feel like it's far more appropriate to compare them with the trash brands
I don't think that's apples to apples either. Brazil has always been their own thing the good and the bad. Now that we have some full bridge options coming out of Korea and China I think that'll be a more fair comparison as we feel out how those hold up.