Axiom Home Page Forums General Discussion The Water Cooler Gonna Try Building a 1kW Class D Amp for Only $396

The heatsinks on all 3 amp boards (CDA, SDS, TI) are all extremely tiny, so I don't think even the SDS amp would have enough heatsink to drive them constantly at these volume levels without forced cooling. The CDA heatsinks measure 1/2" x 1" x 4.25" (a little over 2 cubic inches, the size of two kit-kat bars on top of each other). Looking at the heatsink in my AVR-3806, I'd say it has at least 50x the mass of the heatsink on these boards. The 4-channel amp I built totally assemlbed weighs about 25 lbs, 18 lbs of which is the toroid and 2 lbs for the mounting board. Most of the weight in my AVR-3806 appears to be heatsink (the tranformer is non-toroidal and much smaller).

I have absolutely no regrets on this purchase even with the reduced power output. 100db per channel of quality amplification with no external cooling is nothing to sneeze at, especially at this price and considering how small they are. It will be interesting to see what happens with the addition of more heatink and the addition of a fan or two.