Boss REV-3000D Chaos Amplifier

Ummm...  I will cut to the chase, and you can read the rest if you want to...  Buy it, but to do not believe everything you read.  Seems to be a good value, or "bang for the buck" as you put it, if you take the written specs with a grain of salt.  Now...  where do I start?  I was looking up a few reviews on the 'net, and I cannot believe that some of these people even have computers.  It also says quite a bit for the public school systems...  Here is the skinny.  It appears to be a digital amp, good...  That means they cannot skew the test results TOO much.  Boss always tends to WAY overrate their products, you simply cannot get 600 watts X2 out of an amp that only has two 30 amp fuses in it (600x2=1200, but 30*2*14.4*.5=432 and 1200>432), so I was a bit leary when I heard Boss had a class D amp...  However, digital amps are a different breed altogether, with efficiencies approaching 95%.  I will explain:  In an analog amp, the kind we are all used to, modern topologies approach, but never reach 50%.  A more conservative rating would be closer in the 35-40 percent range.  This is due to the way a transistor tracks the analog signal, as it is never fully on or fully off, therefor it must be standing off at least some of the power supply's high voltage.  When you listen to the amp at lower volumes, the efficiency becomes abysmal, typically 20-25 percent.  What that means is that of all of the power going into an amp, only 20-50% comes out as the power you want it to be...  the rest is HEAT.  Example from above:  two 30 amp fuses equals 60 amps total current draw, 14.4 is the nominal voltage of a car's electrical system while the car is RUNNING, (13.2 while not running), and .5 is the decimal equivalent of 50%, now power equals voltage times current, right?  So: {{{30amps*2fuses}*14.4volts}*50%}  60*14.4*.5=432, and that is the TOTAL output power, now you have to divide that by two to give you the continuous output power PER CHANNEL - 216 watts - a far cry from the advertised 600, eh?  And do not forget about the 432 watts blowing off that heatsink!  These numbers only get worse as you lower the load impedance, as there is more current flowing through the individual junctions of the transistors.  That is why an amp will run hotter when you put too much of a load on it.  OK, now in digital amps, the output is based on a phenomenon called "duty cycle".  If you take a battery and place it across the terminals of a woofer, the cone will move one way, and if you switch the terminals, the cone will move the other way, right?  If you repeat this back and forth motion quickly enough, say 30,000 times a second (referred to as the sampling or switching frequency - higher is better, nay, REQUIRED for high frequencies, lower is better for low frequencies), but the terminals are connected exactly the same length of time for each polarity, that is a "duty cycle" of 50%, and the cone will not move.  If you can do that fast enough, the cone and voice coil cannot move in and out that fast can they?  But if you take the battery and hold it one way for 10 milliseconds, and then the other way for 20 milliseconds, you have a duty cycle of 66% in the direction of the 20ms, and there will be a slight movement in the 20ms direction.  The more of these 66% duty cycles you have in sequence, the further the cone will move out (or in) Repeat, with varying duty cycles.  That is how a digital amp works.  Because the transistors are ALWAYS either fully on or fully off, they do not exhibit the voltage drop across them, and therefore do not heat up nearly as much.  Most digital amps on the market today can reach 90% efficiency or more.  The Boss amp has three 30 amp fuses in it.  Plugging in to the above formula, we get 90*14.4*.90=1166.4watts, pretty close to the advertised 1200 watts RMS into 4 ohms, but I would be a little leary about the 2200 watts claimed at 2 ohms, and VERY skeptical about the 3000 watts they claim at 1 ohm.  Ohm's law cannot be broken...  I hope this has helped.

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