Does anyone know the most powerful audio power amp, everything else excluded? I've looked in Guiness and it doesn't say; I've googled it and I get several different manufacturers claiming to have the most powerful amp. I would assume it's a solid state amp (they can usually produce up to thousands of watts), but does anyone have any guesses or ideas?
Biggest amp I can think of offhand whos specs arent at all classified is at WLW and is tubes.
As W8XO it hit a megawatt in World War II.
During the early 60's WLW broadcast in Class AB with a 50 kW 1% max THD output. Takes a heck of alota juice to get 50kW of RF output using Class AB modulated tubes.
I would not be surprised if some of the worlds naval transmitting amps are more powerful. I dont know what the biggest PA amp is.
The biggest amp I have any parts from was a 250kW shortwave VOA amp from Bethany, OH.
As W8XO it hit a megawatt in World War II.
During the early 60's WLW broadcast in Class AB with a 50 kW 1% max THD output. Takes a heck of alota juice to get 50kW of RF output using Class AB modulated tubes.
I would not be surprised if some of the worlds naval transmitting amps are more powerful. I dont know what the biggest PA amp is.
The biggest amp I have any parts from was a 250kW shortwave VOA amp from Bethany, OH.
There are high powered systems - like the 400kW one mentioned that were made up of many smaller units running together. And of course huge RF transmitters are everywhere.
Those touring sound systems like oh say the Rolling Stones might use may be 70kW, but that is generally a system made up of racks full of amps.
The largest single unit commercial audio amp I know of was made by Crown, and possibly still is. The MA10k - 10,000 watts into 1/2 ohm. By now there are probably competing units from other brands
Those touring sound systems like oh say the Rolling Stones might use may be 70kW, but that is generally a system made up of racks full of amps.
The largest single unit commercial audio amp I know of was made by Crown, and possibly still is. The MA10k - 10,000 watts into 1/2 ohm. By now there are probably competing units from other brands
Not quite for audio but...
http://www.lds-group.com/group119/Power-Amplifiers
It seems the big 280 kW beast is an array of 8 kW amplifier modules though.
http://www.lds-group.com/group119/Power-Amplifiers
It seems the big 280 kW beast is an array of 8 kW amplifier modules though.
Enzo said:
The company that provided the sound equipment for the latest Stones concert used six Crown MA3600VZ per rack, which means a potential total of 21,600W/rack depending on how they're configured and what they're driving. Not sure how many amp racks they used.
Those MA10000s are beasts. Not just powerful but somewhere around 120lbs and they take up four rack spaces, if I remember correctly. They're fun to move around... I've seen Crest Audio amps that came close to that output but didn't crack the 10kW barrier. Let's just say I didn't enjoy cleaning out any of those amps out after they came back from touring
I think I agree that the WLW 500kw transmitter was by far the largest single PA ever built. The specs are more than just amazing and mind boggling they are massive!! The WLW transmitter site is still in daily use and is a transmitter museum in and of itself. All equipment there has been pretty well preserved and rightfully so. Powell Crosley was indeed a person with a great vision whom I think very few have heard of!!
The WLW site deserves a bit more attention for those that may not know about it. WLW Info.........
1999: The original 1927 Western Electric transmitter was fired up on the Millenneum and run on the air......
"I spent the evening at the 700 WLW site babysitting for the dreaded y2k "crash" as suspected it was a whimper of a situation. Since I was a captive audience I decided to amuse myself. My idea was to operate into the millennium operating WLW on the original 1927 model Western Electric 7a 50 kW transmitter. This is the original 50 kW transmitter that WLW signed on with in 1928. It has been maintained and updated quite well through the years. It is still water
cooled and operates very quietly compared to a blower cooled transmitter. After replacing a tube in the RF exciter that had failed sometime in the last month or so, the transmitter came up just fine. I put it on the air at 10:45 PM the 31st of 1999 and operated it till 12:15 am January 01,01,2000. Using a modern audio processor(Orban 9100) to modulate the rig with. It sounded fine and the news department mentioned the fact that we were operating on it in their news casts. I seemed fitting that the transmitter that carried information from the depression era, W.W.II, Korea, Vietnam, man landing on the moon, Kennedy's assassination, FDR's passing, and Nixons impeachment usher the station into the year 2000. The transmitter was taken offline as a main transmitter in 1975 when a Continental 317c1 was installed to operate in main service."
About the 500 kw monster.....
"In 1928, WLW was the first U.S. station to make it to 50 kW, courtesy of an enormous, water-cooled, Western Electric transmitter, the kind with those huge, Frankenstein-ish meters on top and plenty of ominous little windows where one could look in and see how hot the tubes were getting. By then, WLW occupied the choice frequency of 700 kHz, from a majestic antenna farm near Mason, OH, just outside Cincinnati. For several reasons, this was a killer site for coverage. When darkness fell, and the band opened up, the mighty skip wave from Mason's horizontal antenna ruled the sky.
Now, 50 kW was a hell of a lot of juice in 1932. In an old-style, plate-modulated transmitter, it's still a lot of juice in 2000. Crosley, though, knew he could do better. Somehow, he finagled the Federal Radio Commission into an "experimental" authorization for 500 kW, first with the special callsign of W8XO, finally as commercial WLW.
Of course, W8XO really was an experiment, and not a cheap one. Half a megawatt, three-quarters fully modulated, millions of peak-envelope watts, on 700 kHz, with existing tube electronics, had never been tried. Building the beast required the combined engineering talents of RCA, General Electric, and Westinghouse. The investment, changed into today's dollars and at today's engineering prices, might not have been much less than a space mission, which in a way it was.
GE built most of the modules, but RCA put them together, and gave it the historic serial number one. "RCA 1" had a modular design with a lot of built-in redundancy, good for when something blew up, which everyone knew it would. It used the existing 50 kW, unmodulated in class C, for excitation. To this were added three parallel, water-cooled, 167 kW power amplifiers, each with four 100 kW RCA 867 tubes, two to a side in push-pull, making for 12 of these incredibly expensive, five-foot-tall firebottles. Most of this height was the anode's copper heat sink, which fit into a pipelike water jacket.
The huge, high-level modulator was also water-cooled. It could easily make 400 kW audio with both of its largely redundant modules simultaneously cranked to full rock and roll. Fortunately for the survival of civilization, this case was rare. Each module used four more of the biggest tubes made, bringing all of RCA 1's RF and AF output tube complement to twenty, with a total cost of $34,000 in 1930s' depression dollars. Even more mindboggling were the two modulation transformers, one per module, each 37,000 pounds, oil filled, and 10 feet high. It's possible that these two Westinghouse reactors were in fact the world's largest transformers for a brief time - "heavy iron" indeed!
B+ and other voltages came from a bank of six huge, forced-air cooled, mercury-vapor rectifiers. These 450-amp monsters would shake the building's brick walls, not to mention your bones, when they arced back. Pure DC, 3000 amps of it, was put on RCA 1's many filaments. This awesome juice was homemade, by two large motor-generators, plus a hot standby.
Links to sites about the WLW transmitter site...... Enjoy!
Jim Hawkin's WLW Transmitter site
The Nation's Station
See also Jim Hawkin's Blaw-Knox Tower Page. And notice how one ceramic insulator supports 200 tons of WLW transmitter tower!!
Blau-Knox Tower Page
And finally my favorite WLW Quote....
"There is an elderly employee of CG&E who used to man the substation which fed one of WLW's two 33 kv industrial lines. He could tell, he says, when the station was on line at 500 kW The final voltmeter would dance ever so slightly in time to the music. Wow! "
The WLW site deserves a bit more attention for those that may not know about it. WLW Info.........
1999: The original 1927 Western Electric transmitter was fired up on the Millenneum and run on the air......
"I spent the evening at the 700 WLW site babysitting for the dreaded y2k "crash" as suspected it was a whimper of a situation. Since I was a captive audience I decided to amuse myself. My idea was to operate into the millennium operating WLW on the original 1927 model Western Electric 7a 50 kW transmitter. This is the original 50 kW transmitter that WLW signed on with in 1928. It has been maintained and updated quite well through the years. It is still water
cooled and operates very quietly compared to a blower cooled transmitter. After replacing a tube in the RF exciter that had failed sometime in the last month or so, the transmitter came up just fine. I put it on the air at 10:45 PM the 31st of 1999 and operated it till 12:15 am January 01,01,2000. Using a modern audio processor(Orban 9100) to modulate the rig with. It sounded fine and the news department mentioned the fact that we were operating on it in their news casts. I seemed fitting that the transmitter that carried information from the depression era, W.W.II, Korea, Vietnam, man landing on the moon, Kennedy's assassination, FDR's passing, and Nixons impeachment usher the station into the year 2000. The transmitter was taken offline as a main transmitter in 1975 when a Continental 317c1 was installed to operate in main service."
About the 500 kw monster.....
"In 1928, WLW was the first U.S. station to make it to 50 kW, courtesy of an enormous, water-cooled, Western Electric transmitter, the kind with those huge, Frankenstein-ish meters on top and plenty of ominous little windows where one could look in and see how hot the tubes were getting. By then, WLW occupied the choice frequency of 700 kHz, from a majestic antenna farm near Mason, OH, just outside Cincinnati. For several reasons, this was a killer site for coverage. When darkness fell, and the band opened up, the mighty skip wave from Mason's horizontal antenna ruled the sky.
Now, 50 kW was a hell of a lot of juice in 1932. In an old-style, plate-modulated transmitter, it's still a lot of juice in 2000. Crosley, though, knew he could do better. Somehow, he finagled the Federal Radio Commission into an "experimental" authorization for 500 kW, first with the special callsign of W8XO, finally as commercial WLW.
Of course, W8XO really was an experiment, and not a cheap one. Half a megawatt, three-quarters fully modulated, millions of peak-envelope watts, on 700 kHz, with existing tube electronics, had never been tried. Building the beast required the combined engineering talents of RCA, General Electric, and Westinghouse. The investment, changed into today's dollars and at today's engineering prices, might not have been much less than a space mission, which in a way it was.
GE built most of the modules, but RCA put them together, and gave it the historic serial number one. "RCA 1" had a modular design with a lot of built-in redundancy, good for when something blew up, which everyone knew it would. It used the existing 50 kW, unmodulated in class C, for excitation. To this were added three parallel, water-cooled, 167 kW power amplifiers, each with four 100 kW RCA 867 tubes, two to a side in push-pull, making for 12 of these incredibly expensive, five-foot-tall firebottles. Most of this height was the anode's copper heat sink, which fit into a pipelike water jacket.
The huge, high-level modulator was also water-cooled. It could easily make 400 kW audio with both of its largely redundant modules simultaneously cranked to full rock and roll. Fortunately for the survival of civilization, this case was rare. Each module used four more of the biggest tubes made, bringing all of RCA 1's RF and AF output tube complement to twenty, with a total cost of $34,000 in 1930s' depression dollars. Even more mindboggling were the two modulation transformers, one per module, each 37,000 pounds, oil filled, and 10 feet high. It's possible that these two Westinghouse reactors were in fact the world's largest transformers for a brief time - "heavy iron" indeed!
B+ and other voltages came from a bank of six huge, forced-air cooled, mercury-vapor rectifiers. These 450-amp monsters would shake the building's brick walls, not to mention your bones, when they arced back. Pure DC, 3000 amps of it, was put on RCA 1's many filaments. This awesome juice was homemade, by two large motor-generators, plus a hot standby.
Links to sites about the WLW transmitter site...... Enjoy!
Jim Hawkin's WLW Transmitter site
The Nation's Station
See also Jim Hawkin's Blaw-Knox Tower Page. And notice how one ceramic insulator supports 200 tons of WLW transmitter tower!!
Blau-Knox Tower Page
And finally my favorite WLW Quote....
"There is an elderly employee of CG&E who used to man the substation which fed one of WLW's two 33 kv industrial lines. He could tell, he says, when the station was on line at 500 kW The final voltmeter would dance ever so slightly in time to the music. Wow! "
RCA 1 is definitely the world's most monsterous amp. Even if you only count one of the three paralleled sections as an "amp", its still a monster at 167kW nominal each and capable of twice that. No one solid state module is going to come anywhere close to that sustained.
The antennea looks crazy in person, hows that little pound withstand 900,000 lbs of pressure.
By 2 33kV industrial lines, they mean two sets of three phase power cables.
PA voltage of 11.7 Kilovolts with a PA current of 65 Amperes, which yields a DC input power of 747.5 KW.
The antennea looks crazy in person, hows that little pound withstand 900,000 lbs of pressure.
By 2 33kV industrial lines, they mean two sets of three phase power cables.
PA voltage of 11.7 Kilovolts with a PA current of 65 Amperes, which yields a DC input power of 747.5 KW.
1 rack space 40KW amplifier (480V/3Ph recommended).
PKN 3phase 40kw power amplifier - YouTube
10KW/2Ω x4 or 20KW/4Ω x2
PKN 3phase 40kw power amplifier - YouTube
10KW/2Ω x4 or 20KW/4Ω x2
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Possibly a guy up in Sacramento, CA. -- makes an audio amp of several thousand Watts ( 5K-10KW) using Transmitting tubes. For home use. See Rainbow Electronics.
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the best is we can say what mains it will be driven by.
its no problem to build a 20KW amp. but who the hell has a 20+KW main line in there home???
you CAN NOT get 10KW power out of a 16A 230V main line.
get a 400V 64A line in your livingroom. then its a chance for getteng som extreme power.
its no problem to build a 20KW amp. but who the hell has a 20+KW main line in there home???
you CAN NOT get 10KW power out of a 16A 230V main line.
get a 400V 64A line in your livingroom. then its a chance for getteng som extreme power.
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