The Good. The Bad and the Ugly Car Amps

[normalicy]

Yeah, the Human Reigns amazed me with their uglyness.

As for best looking, I couldn't decide. Always liked the Adcom's understated beauty.

[mjh7096]

My favorites were the Punch 150, 75 and 45. My all-time favorite is the punch 250.1 power amplifier. The bad were the old swap meet Unic amps. Actually, back in the late 80's they were a decent swap meet model amp.

[tsmith1315]

"Unic Products Are Unique"

[jol50]

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.

[Andrew Eckhardt]

Originally Posted by klimaudio

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.

[tsmith1315]

Originally Posted by jol50

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

I dealt with the '85-'86 models (mostly EQ/boosters), and you'd need to go long on that guess for them. Way long.

Thanks for the A/D/S tip, Andrew.

[jol50]

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....

[tsmith1315]

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.

[damage]

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.

[mavric]

amp good, subs bad
we call the subs "rockford FosBreak"
I am a fan of the BD series( 1000bd) awesome and under rated