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

Make sure to post your progress on the build, Steve.

Gets your thumbs up… where?

Will do. It's shipping today so I should have the parts by Friday. The first assembly will be quick and dirty just to get it going and test it out (it will be ugly to look at). It should not take more than a couple of hours to do this, so I should have my initial impressions this weekend (I wish I had a THD analyzer!). I think I may wind up buying a clamp on ammeter to measure amp current draw and use my sound meter to measure db output. I know this amp will use less power to get the same db output, but I would love to take some measurements against my AVR-3806. I do have an infrared thermometer, so I'll shoot the heatsink to see how hot it gets (open air).

The final assembly (time and money involved) will depend on how good it sounds

Geektastic.

I'm interested in this. But I'm not really very good at soldering. Many posts in the linked thread go far beyond my current or desired level of electrical theory.

Pictures would be cool.

Thanks, Steve!

I've only done 2 builds. Back when I was an early teen. I bought 2 of those light kits that made lights flash in time with the music. The instructions were a little fuzzy concerning the orientation of the rectifier. I put it in the way it looked good to me, but when I first went to turn it on, it blew up in a pile of smoke. The second one, I turned it around and it worked just fine.

One of the pluses the lured me to this system was that you really do not need to solder anything for the initial quick and dirty hookup. All of the connections between the boards are done with screw terminals. Soldering is an option of couse down the road for external run and trip leds, power switches, and binding posts.

The other thing that lured me was all of the positive comments, and the quality of the parts involved. The Heavy Duty Power Supply uses Nichicon 100V, 105C, 4700uF capacitors (very good quality Japanese capacitors). I priced them out online and the best price I could find was about $14 a pop when buying less than 50 of them at a time... The power supply board has 6 of them, and he sells the whole board for $65 before an additional discount if you buy a kit.

Wait, can you use them bridged with your M80s? I didn't think you could bridge amps when you were dealing with a 4 ohm load.

These amps are rated down to 2 ohm individually, and will work bridged with a 4 ohm load. I also confirmed this with Tom before I bought them.

Sweet. Which model of amp is it?

CDA-254. The 4 suffix designates 4 ohm stable. Although he only publishes it as 500W 8 ohm bridged, he does confirm it will also drive 4 ohm when bridged. Power will be slightly more, but not double. It will start clipping (>1% distotion) long before 1000W.