Amps upside down w/forced cooling?

aznboi3644:

You know, we always talk about how important the setup details are in a car system...damping, crossovers, enclosure design / strength, locations of speakers, and all that.  I put more in time spent to get everything to sound its best rather than money spent on equipment.  For a lower mid-grade system, this sounds very good.  $50 sub driver, less than 200 watts, gives me more sub bass than I need.

Of course, I'm getting on in years a bit now.  Not trying to attract attention at red lights...

I designed that so that the wire shelving takes the energy and dissipates it before it goes into the amps.  It works good.  You can hardly feel a thing when you put your fingertips against those amps, system cranked.

Hook your Dad, that's good.  Soon Mom will be rolling her eyes when he starts gathering up stuff for his "install".  My wife rolls her eyes like a madwoman whenever I start hinting at needing an upgrade in anything audio...but on the other hand she's the first one to crank up the sound to show off for people.

No, not cooling.  Damping.  The amplifiers still get as warm as they usually would, but without the vibrations (energy) transferred into them from the car body I feel more comfortable with long life out of these amps with their (I assume to be) delicate circuits.

BTW, the class D mono amp never gets warm, but the same manufacturer's class A/B stereo amp gets almost hot.  Shows the difference in the two types' efficiency.  USacoustics...I think they may be a thing of the past.  I never see them anymore.

The popular way of making amp racks, in that the amp is recessed into a plywood or MDF panel in order to hide wiring, seems to me to be a bad way to mount them.  Yes, they look good that way, that is true.  But heat transfer is lessened because of the recessed, tight-fit mounting, and nothing is done about minimizing energy transfer from the car's body.  The vibrations may not be as much of an issue as I imagine, but there definitely has to be airflow under the amplifier to allow for heat escape out the top.