Has your Anthem ignited yet, Michael? All the ADAs I have run cool even with 2400W peaks.

Class D for the win! Not sure why so many amps are still being made with old spaceheater amp technology.

It's difficult to design class D amps. Anthem has the M1 and it's a marvel of engineering but it's ridiculously expensive. I think this is because Anthem is trying to recover the multi-million dollar dev costs for that product.

And yet Axiom was able to design awesome class D amps and sell them at reasonable prices. Pretty amazing, especially considering the tiny size of their operation.

Back around 1980 I took a independent elective to design a power amp. I was pushing to do this cool new class D design which I found a write up on. My professor at the time convinced me to start off with something more conventional ... good thing he did ... as that was hard enough.

Today it’s a lot easier as one can choose from an assortment of chips to help with the heavy lifting ...

Indeed. It was a difficult journey though. It's one of the reasons Ian is one of my heroes.

True it's a lot easier for people who don't know what they're doing to hang themselves.

It’s also easier for people who don’t know how things work to build things that actually work. You can build a a PC without understanding how a computer works. I can buy an Ethernet controller and installl a driver and make it work ... with out knowing anything about the hardware, software, or communication protocol. So today for $20 and almost no design time with little knowledge I did what would have cost millions and years of design time 40 years ago.

When you're building stuff for the public, you can't be a hacker. You need to engineer the stuff. If you do what you suggest, shit breaks, it can't be maintained, it can't be extended, and on and on. Chips definitely help cut down design time but engineering is a lot more than "just" design and that's why hacked products fail to bring a good return (all other things being equal) .

Not yet, but I'm not using ANY of the amps. I have an external ICE base amplifiers. - and they run cool.

I did get my T8 cooling fan. Pretty slick device. I can set it up to start pulling air at any temp or fan speed. I have not had time to watch a movie though, so I don't know if the Anthem's fan will run yet.

I might also add that some of the guys at AVS reported the MRX fan would run, even when using external amps, so this is not a "hot amp" thing, but a processor thing. My MRX fan only came on during movies with multi-channel sound processing.