Hifonics Brutus BX1500D

[FireII]

I got in a Hifonics bx1500d ealier this week, just now getting around to it. I have not worked on a lot of Hifonics amps, I wanted to see if anyone else on here could give me some insight.

Customer said his amp stopped working, so, he pulled it out of the sink(for whatever reason) and turned it on. Of course he started a fire and brought it to me. I found a coulpe of shorted outputs, I'd imagine that this was the cause of the amp to stop working in the first place, all power supply fets were toast, all gate resistors were toast, one pull down resistor was toast from the fire. I checked the drive signal from the KIA494, all is beautiful there. Even thought the ps drivers tested ok, I ordered replacements anyway. I have about a $75 list of parts, including an HIP4080AIP(because I did some reading and apparently the h bridge ussually fails in the hifonics when the outputs fail). I think I have the PS side of things under control, my question is, are the any other hifonics querks that I need to be aware of? So far here is my parts list:

FQP65n06
IRF3710
100ohm gate resistors
220ohm pull downs
KIA1266 drivers
10ohm 2watt resistors (not sure what they're for but one was toast during the fire. They are flameproof and in the PS section, one in each power supply)
HIP4080AIP

Thank you.

[1moreamp]

Parts list looks about right to me. Seen a few other things die inside these but there wasn't enough left of the board to repair them in those cases. Broken leads on the power devices is a real nightmare on these, just ask Perry, he knows about this issue all too well...

[Perry Babin]

IF you haven't placed the order yet, order the IRF3710Z. The non-Z version often cause problems.

[FireII]

Well, I now have both....

=)

[FireII]

I got all the new parts installed a couple of days ago and there's still a problem in the audio side somwhere. I was getting very odd and distored output on the speaker terminals. As I was tracing down the signal, the amp shut off and was trying to pull large amounts of current. It ended up being 3 shorted outputs, I had just replaced all the outputs. When I was tracing down the signal the amp was not under load. What would cause the outputs to short like that?

Edit: I even had a 2ohm current limiter in place when the failure happened.

[1moreamp]

If the HIP4080AIP was not bad it might be the signal driving the HIP chip.

I have had these HIP4080AIP chips be bad even new and unused. Hence the socket you see its sitting in. I feel the manufacturers had such a failure rate that the factory used a socket so they could get the product off the line and delivered without tons of rework and soldering involved.

You never really see any other chip in ANY car audio product treated this way I.E. the socket mounting.....Just this one chip and this one style of Class D amplifier. All the rest are soldered and mounted using standard methods...hope this helps some...


PS welcome aboard the "been there, seen that boat" this design of amps has going for it. Virtually all the HIP4080AIP chip amps suffer from very similar issues. this includes Hifonics, US amps, Earthquake PHD series etc.....etc...etc.... Anything with this design and the HIP4080AIP fet driver...