Help with Crown XLS 2000

[butterfenco]

I love this amp, but there are two questions i have about it. I have it hooked up to a 15in dayton audio reference series RF 15", and this sub is 500w rms mind you, it is hooked up 4 ohms briged, for 2100w rms, and it just seems like it should have more power than it does. It gets really loud, and gets the sub warm if i let it, (only takes about 20-40secs full power, then it smells a little), but it just seems like that if it was doing rated power, the sub would just bottom out and blow in a matter of seconds, it is in too small of a box(about 2-3 cu ft, it needs 8-10 per sub, might be why it dont bottom out) do you guys think im getting full power out of this amp?? and if i am, do you think it will be stable at 2ohms briged, im getting another 15in dayton. some good car audio amps that are rated stable at 1ohm are fine at .5ohms, so i figure crown is supposed to be one of the best, maybe it will to..

[Th3 uN1Qu3]

2 ohms bridged... no chance. Car audio is a totally different market - there the goal is to squeeze as much power as possible out of a 12v battery, and you need low impedance loads for that. Low impedance loads require lots of output transistors. All commercial amplifiers, Crown included, use the minimum number of transistors required, because they aren't cheap. The protection scheme takes care of the rest. And an amplifier that's running into the protection limiter all the time isn't going to sound too nice.

Btw, for a 2 ohm load running on any sensible cable length at >1kW you need the speaker cable to be at least 8AWG or you lose a lot of the power on the cable itself.