what makes an amp hot?

[sumone 10+ year member]

aside from not being in a well-ventilated area? would the heat that an amp gives off have mostly to do with the input signal (power wire & connection, not rcas) or mostly with the output (speaker wire & connections)? mine gets pretty hot and cuts off sometimes, even after 10 minutes.

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[sumone 10+ year member]

okay, I understand your explanation. but really I wanted to take it from the standpoint that if you have 2 of the exact same amps with identical settings (gains&filters), in the same location, and only one of them gets hot, would it have to do with a bad connection on the power/ground wire(s) & connections or with the speaker wire & connections?

cause I have the usx4065, and I've read reviews of people saying the amp doesn't get hot, and mine does.

 

[helotaxi 5,000+ posts]

You have one set of channels bridged. That is going to cause it to heat up because the amp is being required to 1) create more power and 2) flow more current to do it. Current flowing through and device with resistance (basically anything short of a superconductor) loses energy as heat. More resistance=more heat. More current=a lot more heat.

Just to help a bit, how it the amp mounted? If you mount it vertically with the cooling fins on the heat sink running vertically, the air being heated by the amp will rise and run along the heatsink drawing heat away from it as it does. This will basically act as a free low volume fan. An actual fan would be better, but mounting can play a huge role.

 

[sumone 10+ year member]

hmm, never thought about the bridging aspect of it. I was just thinking maybe I had a bad crimp job somewhere. Right now it's just sitting on the floor of the trunk on the far left side wedged towards the rear-end lights, so that if I was to stop suddenly, the frame of the rear left wheel prevents it from moving.

My plan is to mount it vertically on the back seat - that is until I find a very, very, very long extension cord for my drill's 2-3 foot cord.