Super-power amps - higher current better than higher voltage

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Thinking back a few posts, about the 5kw 30" sub...

How can a peice of paper(or cardboard, or better yet plastic) that is over 30" wide move back and forth in the earth's atmosphere at up to 300 times a second without blowing to bits. I mean... you'd need a cone with material that was maybe over a 1/4" thick, unless it was somehow made of titanium:eek: all of which are very heavy for a speaker cone. You might as well mount the driver in a ported box so that it sits face up, connect a dryer hose to the port, feed it a 3hz
sine wave and use it as a combination jolly jumper/tire pump:cool:
 
(going a few posts back) Circlotron, I have no actually built that many grand audio things, I'm sorry to say. I have built 2x ESP Project03 (souped up though), I have comleted 1 Leach amp, and I'm working on several more Leach amps now. I plan to build several other amps in the very near future (200W into 2 ohm). I have built some power supplies, many speaker boxes, and some high voltage toys, including a jacobs ladder, 10kV electric squirt gun (I'm scared to death to fire it though), and some HV supplies, and of course my awesome cooling system for my big amp. My big project will envolve only 450W and smaller amps, and will be a huge learning experience as well as a huge project. I hope the idea of 7200W so early in one's career doesn't scare you, but when you break it down, it's really not so bad.

P.S. Duo, it can withstand it because it is not paper or plastic, it's aluminum! The 12's that I want to use in my big system are also aluminum cone and are made by the same company. It's actually quite nice as a cone material, so I've heard.
 
The idea is to deliver electricity through a water stream. It consists of 2 large syringe type squirt guns hot glued to a wooden frame. These are filled with a salt/vinegar solution to increase conductivity of the streams. A power supply is then connected to ring terminals around the nozzles. This power supply is a microwave oven transformer (2kV, 500mA) followed by a voltage quadrupler.

This is a super, duper, duper, extra, extremely, ultra dangerous project!, that power supply could kill several of you in series in a microsecond. It can supply over 10kVDC at almost unlimited peak current, possibly into the hundreds of A from those capacitors. It jumps almost an inch through the air with a very loud bang and an arc nearly as bright as a photoflash. I would definately not recommend using something like this for anything under ANY circumstances whatsoever, as the chances of instant death accompanied by severe burning are very high, I would imagine.

If ever actually used, it would need to be mostly covered by and held by a plastic thing of some type, you'd need to wear thick rubber gloves, and it would need to be COMPLETELY dried off. With normal guns it's "be sure of your target and beyond," with this thing it's "be sure of your target and any way you might be electrically connected to it." It's surprisisng how conductive water, and espectially this solution, is from 10kV's perspective. I have run the supply through a thin bead of this solution totaling about 12 feet long, it put on quite a fire show.

I just made it because I had a bunch of microwave parts laying around and nothing better to do, I wouldn't think of using it in it's current state, or any other state for that matter, unless the world was coming to an end and I was being attacked by electrically-sensitive beasts from outer space with 3 foot long razor sharp claws and 3 inch thick carbide coated steel exoskeletons. It defies nearly every electrical safety protocol ever thought of. It's just a display item, but functional in theory. I can't stress enough how dangerous it could be.
 
Okay, I was thinking "neon sign xfmr --- 15kv @ 60ma, and some big oil caps :D I have all kinds of high voltage high current junk, so I like to experiment with it instead of leaving it sit redundant in the junk pile. That's kinda why I wanted to make some huge amplifiers, I have a set of monster speakers (dual 12" vultan matched bass drivers, 5" Hokuto Onkyo "Hokutone mids
and unknown horn tweeters which actually sound very good. I've had other BIG amps hooked up to these that belonged to other people. We'd hook up a monster and crank it loud as it would go safely before clipping and go outside the house and watch the old wood shingles rattle around as the speakers made their way to the other side of the room on the hardwood floor leaving a nice
low frequency reproduction record cut in the floor enamel... I swear, you could probably drag a tone arm needle through a scratch in the floor and find out what I was listening to that day:D Well, not quite, but good for my imagination. Anyhow, these speaker can handle (actually suck) huge current, so I wanted to use some parts lying around to make an amp capable of breaking windows and lightbulbs making the neighbors go looney while their dishes fall out of the cupboards (which actually did happen once and I could get other people to justify that... heehee
 
What kind of speakers are these? Those 3055s have enough power handling between them all to make some serious noise, nearly 900W is starting to push the limits of them, 1800 if you get compliments.:D It sounds like you want something like what I'm building, only inside.:eek: Keep in mind that you'll probably have the cops down. A friend of mine has been warned numerous times with his 240W (should bd 480, but 1 channel is toast) system with a 15", a 5", and 4x 1.5" dome tweeters per box (2 boxes).

P.S. There's all kinds of cool stuff you can do with that HV stuff, but Tesla coils and SS amps don't mix.:confused:
 
I'm not sure exactly what "kind" of speakers they are... I know that they were made custom by Speakerlabs in Vancouver BC
but the company was bought out long ago and the new people won't talk. I have however decided to not make a 3055 amp but a 2sc3856/2sa1492 amplifier with 2 pairs of each on the OT, I'm convinced that I can get 400w.r.m.s out of that, but in an esp page I saw an amp with the same transistors and he said to add
2 more pairs of transistors to reliably run 300 watts into 4 ohms...
Im pretty sure that the transistors are rated at 15 amps a piece
and 400watts into 4 ohms is only 56.5 volts making 14.125 amps
making only 7.06 amps per transistor. So I can't see what the big deal is when a transistor rated at 15 amps and 200 volts is running at 7 amps @about 3volts making it dissipate about 25
watts along with other things...

EDIT: okay that was stupid of me to go and blurt all that out
W/O doing any research! I looked at the esp pages(where else?)
and found out all kinds of stuff. For example, if my output swings to quarter of the rail to rail voltage either way, I'll have my transistor dissipating the most heat because 60/2=30 30 volts into 4ohms=7.5amps for the transistor: 7.5*30=225watts/2=112.5 watts per transistor on that side of the swing add in derating for the heat generated and then add in
the current fed back into the amp by the speaker, and I find it would be very easy to exceed the limits and fry the OT transistors... So in that case, I'll have to double the amount of
transistors in each amp I build, but it's worth it!:D
 
Do you have a datasheet for those transistors? At 400W into 4 ohms, would they all be safely within their SOA? You might want to check, but I think they should actually handle that just fine. You might even be able to get 450W, but that might be pushing it. Not that an extra 50W would really matter anyway. Ought to work.
 
e96mlo

I thought the point we were discussing was the suitability of transistors as low voltage high current devices, therefore needing low impedance speakers. I have shown you that they exist, So is it more rewarding to pursue this line of enquiry?I'm not an engineer so I don't have the anwser's. I repeat, the auto guys seem to do just fine with 12 volts:)
 
NOW the truth comes out...

Duo said:
I wanted to use some parts lying around to make an amp capable of breaking windows and lightbulbs making the neighbors go looney while their dishes fall out of the cupboards (which actually did happen once and I could get other people to justify that... heehee

Aha!! So it was YOU that was cranking up the watts in your cabin to the extent that it made the Titanic sink. I remember the dishes part... ;) ;) ;)
 
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