The Good. The Bad and the Ugly Car Amps

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I was using pyramid paper subs for a while with great success, way back. I bought some unic subs that looked similar (all ~$15 subs). They were half what the pyramids were, I put them in some old home speaker boxes and they are still playing on shelves near the ceiling...with a $8 1" softdome tweeter from radio shack about the same age. They sound great for garage speakers.

I never saw the amps at the time, but I can guess.
 
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My Favorite Amp

A/D/S 860MX

No cheesey graphics....low profile and highly configurable for the time. 8 channels with multiple crossover and each pair was bridgeable. Too bad somebody wanted it more than I did...it was liberated from my trunk about 5 years back.

If I'm not mistaken it was the MX series that used a JFET front end and a FET driven bipolar output stage (2sk214/j74, 2sC3281/A1302). Those amps were the only thing "mainstream" going on in car audio at the time that actually would generate a serious sound stage. I was saddened when they went out of production before I bought some.
 
I read someplace a JFET amp can have a different sound, or rather clip more like a tube amp. Unless that was for outputs I don't know.

I have a sentrek booster here someplace, seems like there were a million boosters out there. Also have a sparko 7 band and a couple others. :) I wonder if the roadrunner transformer amp I have goes louder....:spin:
 
As nostalgia, I miss the old EQ/boosters. We old-timers logged many hours finding the right place to mount them in-dash/under-dash and cut a lot of ABS trying to make them look good, huh? What a pain for a $99 sale.

My favorite by a long stretch was the BEA-80 from Blaupunkt, and it's 2-ch little brother the BEA-40.
 
lol Tim

When I was a teen, we had 5 different cars. I made a single portable console designed to sit on the tranny hump of all of them with a cigarette lighter cord to power the deck and boosters; 2 amps, 1 FM. Then all the cars had the orange Sparkomatic speakers in them. I was constantly pulling those speakers and resoldering the VC leads.
 
Ha, I had one of those sanyo 100s in the late 80s running my highs, it barely had enough power and replaced it with a coustic 150 later 300. My friend still has the 7 band EQ that came with the amp but I think he got rid of the amp. It might have been 100w, IIRC it was an IC amp like some Blaupunkts I have and an ADS.
 
The blaupunkt bma amp I had was kind of wide and long and had fins running like most 90's model amps, I think the power supply board was seperate from the audio side but it was beefy. I had very thick wiring, beefy traces and well laid out circuits. It wasn't wimpy like the pyramids with similar designs. I actually repaired something in it for a guy and was impressed with the sound quality. This was back in the late 90's but not sure how old the amp was. I think it was 4 x 75 watts rms into 4ohms.
 
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