Best Buy employee comments on product
Written: Jul 30 '00
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Lots of watts for the dollar
Cons: not 1ohm stable, reliability, ease of use
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| nquinn's Full Review: Rockford Fosgate Punch 800a2 Car Amp |
As a product specialist at Best Buy, I have thoroughly tested
this amplifier and found all of its advantages and drawbacks.
Overall, you get a lot of watts for your money, but the amp
is not stable enough to be reliably used for more than 2 subs. (read on)
The Rockford Fosgate 800aII is an amp that is far underrated.
From inspection of several amps, I have found that most are
actually rated between 950-1100 watts (at 14.4volts).
This is a 2 channel amplifier, with the following specs:
200 x 2 @ 4ohms
400 x 2 @ 2ohms
800 x 1 @ 4ohms (mono)
For typical uses, this amp packs a lot of punch. There is plenty of
power for your subwoofers. These are high-current amplifiers, and
will easily handle high-voltage RCA outputs (such as 4v and 5v).
The bass is clear and undistorted, and the bass boost function works
very well as long as it is not overused.
The crossovers in the amp leave something to be desired. Even with
the low-pass filters set extremely low, some highs seemed to seep through.
A few drawbacks of this amplifier:
1) This amp is NOT 1 ohm stable. That means, if you want
to run 4ohm speakers in parallel in bridged mode, the amp
will heat up and shut down. Thus, you will never see 800x2
into your subs.
2) The control panels are covered by the side panels, which are
allen-wrenched on. Once you setup this amp, it is not very
convenient to change the settings.
3) The tri-mode setup for the amp ( 3 subs ) does not seem
as efficient as it should be.
4) Several returns on this product have indicated that the amp
tends to heat up quite easily, and should be set at a reasonable
gain level. The amp should never be run below 2ohms if you
plan on keeping it for a long time.
Overall, this amp is good for people who want to power 2 subwoofers,
each with an 8 ohm impedance. I have listened to this amp with
several different subwoofers (Punch DVC, Vega 124, IDQ 12", more)
and it provides plenty of juice, even for the more inefficient
subs.
Recommended:
No
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Epinions.com ID:
nquinn
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Member: Neil Quinn
Reviews written: 16
Trusted by: 2 members
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