Quote:
Originally Posted by crOwcaine /forum/post/18670229
For the record, when my v3 amp was installed, it hummed the same as the old ones. Maybe even more. MFW's hum, all of them. I'm not going to kid myself and neither should anyone else.
Call me lucky, none of mine have any hum.
I just received the new amp, first impression is the center bolt needs a lock washer. The transformer spins freely so I had to tighten it up fresh out of the box.
The perception of the amp being cheap, well, they didn't silk screen anything but the PCB's behind the black plate. I don't think anybody cares about the PCB's being labled except for the owner of AV123. In my view, no matter how good the amplifier may be, it LOOKS cheap and first impressions are hard to get over. If I were AV123 I would at
minimum put the company logo on it as in previous versions of the amp. Anything would be better than the stark look of this new amp. How about AV123 "Proudly made in the USA", if you could print proudly made in China, how hard can it be to say the same thing about having it made in your own country.
Next up, the on/off switch is a 3 position switch however the middle position turns it on just like going to position 3.
Setting up the gain is different than setting it up on the MFW with v1 and v2 amplifiers. If I get a new v2 amp I know if I set the gain the same as my other MFW it will dial in exactly and they typically do, I have had 6 amplifiers worth of setting them up to get to know this.
Amp v3 is a different animal and I can't set it up in the HT with the other MFW because the wife is in one of those rare moods (not so rare since menapause has set in), any married guy who's wife is going through this knows, if she is in a mood (young guys, the moods your wife goes through now, pale, trust me!) you head to the man cave or any where she isn't. Generally I just watch TV with her and wait till she becomes human again...
Ok, TMI meters running high so time to digress, so back to the amp. I have it in the man cave running my Franken MFW and it does take more gain, about a 1/4 or more of a turn of the knob to get the same output as amp v2, does this mean it has less power? No, I don't believe so but I can't crank it up to see how it compares either.
Initially, sound quality is good, it
seems to push the driver even at low volumes as well as the previous amp. When the wife heads to Best Buy I'll do some louder testing but for now it does work.
Amplifier quality compared to v2, looking at the components this amplifier looks like it's using better components. The PCB's look to be the same thickness but the soldering is cleaner and parts are closer to the board. I would say this board is as much better as v2 was to v1. V1 was a mess, the components looked like a 10 year old was givin a short lesson on installation and then set loose to build an amp. At least the v1's I had were that way.
One complaint, the port for the power plug, I have to jam it in to get a connection. At first I thought I got a dud amp but a second shove got it in far enough.
More later, waiting for the wife to head to the store...