DO NOT MESSAGE ME ABOUT THESE AMPS. I have nothing to do with Sanway or purchasing these amps. Any information I have is in this thread. If you have questions, CONTACT THE MFR. The information is in this thread.
So in my quest for even more power, I ended up looking for the biggest amp I could find. That ended up to be the Lab Gruppen FP14000. However, I would need four of them, and a cost of $6500 a piece put them out of my range. Fortunately, the fine PRC of China does not care much for intellectual property, and has produced a magnificent clone. Actually, they produced many clones. The problem was finding a good one.
Tasso, CVR,and a few other companies will resell busted or QC failed amps, or even clones from another source. Many other companies will resell another company's amp and claim it as their own (shocking).
In my search, I found two suppliers who were producing their own units. These were Gisen and Sanway. I ended up purchasing from Sanway for a few reasons. First, they use higher capacity capacitors. Second, their heatsinks are actual copper. The only downside is that each amp has four fans that I will have to replace or put a resistor inline to quiet them down. I'm in the process of doing this now as I have a bunch of test fans. The fans in the amp are 24v. The amps are priced at $726 a piece. Quite the bargain if you feel comfortable wiring money to China with no recourse if your goods don't show up. It cost a little over $400 to ship them DHL to NY.
If someone wants to try one of the Gisen, be my guest. When I was going to order a sample to compare anyway, they told me they didn't have the parts on hand to build it. Two days later they told me they were good to go, but after that I didn't even want to risk it. If someone else wants to order one from there and compare, that would be cool, but the Sanway amps are great.
Anyway, onto the good stuff. These amps are monsters. My subs go so much louder now. Easily +6db over the MA-5050s in stereo mode at 4ohms (tested at 10hz). When the bass hits, it literally dims the lights in my house. I have 200a service. The amps are connected on four 30a breakers at 120v. The displays on these are nice. They will not blind you, and have nice level meters.
Now for the bad stuff. The amps weren't exactly perfect. The one issue I've seen so far is that one of the voltage protection switches when set to "hard" will cause the VPL light to light. This is only on one amp and I am going to contact Sanway about it. It's not a feature I'm using, so I don't really care. UPDATE: I have contacted Sanway. They have supposedly isolated the issue and are sending me a replacement part to fix the power supply board. I will update further when I receive more information. They said it was damaged by Franklinism which cracked me up. Franklinism is static electricity =]
UPDATE2: I have replaced the fans. The amp went from 75db to 52db at the front panel. They are nice and quiet now. However, the cooling is greatly reduced. I pummeled these for a few hours and could not get them to overheat in anything resembling a normal condition. I was running these HARD, very heavy dubstep at levels that became physically uncomfortable to be in the same room. They didn't come close to overheating. The only way I was able to get the temperatures to spike was to run them full out for over 10 minutes. Let me tell you, this wasn't fun. I turned off three of the amps, so I only had one enclosure and one amp running. The lights for -4 were on, and I turned up the knob another 3db. I finally was able to push it into uncomfortable territory. Beating on them for hours, I was only able to push it up to 73C at most. I was able to push it over 90 going flat out. The unmodified amp was on average 15-20C cooler. I didn't notice any performance decreases during any of this, and I would have pushed the amp further if I wasn't worried about melting the VC's of my very expensive drivers.
So, 300-400ohm resistor (using wire wound 5w) and 60mm fan and then an 80mm fan. It takes two of each of those per amp. Pics here, writeup here.
Here are some pics I've accrued from Sanway, and some pics of what I received. They shipped the amps DHL and they got here in 3-4 days. You can see their other clones on their alibaba page which also links to their real page. You can also email them at sanway.audio@gmail.com .
Pics from me:
Pics from Sanway:
(older version)
Price List
Pictures of the 10000Q were also posted. It is very similar and looks to possibly use the same power supply with different amp modules.
I'm relinking the pictures here. Thanks DL86.
So in my quest for even more power, I ended up looking for the biggest amp I could find. That ended up to be the Lab Gruppen FP14000. However, I would need four of them, and a cost of $6500 a piece put them out of my range. Fortunately, the fine PRC of China does not care much for intellectual property, and has produced a magnificent clone. Actually, they produced many clones. The problem was finding a good one.
Tasso, CVR,and a few other companies will resell busted or QC failed amps, or even clones from another source. Many other companies will resell another company's amp and claim it as their own (shocking).
In my search, I found two suppliers who were producing their own units. These were Gisen and Sanway. I ended up purchasing from Sanway for a few reasons. First, they use higher capacity capacitors. Second, their heatsinks are actual copper. The only downside is that each amp has four fans that I will have to replace or put a resistor inline to quiet them down. I'm in the process of doing this now as I have a bunch of test fans. The fans in the amp are 24v. The amps are priced at $726 a piece. Quite the bargain if you feel comfortable wiring money to China with no recourse if your goods don't show up. It cost a little over $400 to ship them DHL to NY.
If someone wants to try one of the Gisen, be my guest. When I was going to order a sample to compare anyway, they told me they didn't have the parts on hand to build it. Two days later they told me they were good to go, but after that I didn't even want to risk it. If someone else wants to order one from there and compare, that would be cool, but the Sanway amps are great.
Anyway, onto the good stuff. These amps are monsters. My subs go so much louder now. Easily +6db over the MA-5050s in stereo mode at 4ohms (tested at 10hz). When the bass hits, it literally dims the lights in my house. I have 200a service. The amps are connected on four 30a breakers at 120v. The displays on these are nice. They will not blind you, and have nice level meters.
Now for the bad stuff. The amps weren't exactly perfect. The one issue I've seen so far is that one of the voltage protection switches when set to "hard" will cause the VPL light to light. This is only on one amp and I am going to contact Sanway about it. It's not a feature I'm using, so I don't really care. UPDATE: I have contacted Sanway. They have supposedly isolated the issue and are sending me a replacement part to fix the power supply board. I will update further when I receive more information. They said it was damaged by Franklinism which cracked me up. Franklinism is static electricity =]
UPDATE2: I have replaced the fans. The amp went from 75db to 52db at the front panel. They are nice and quiet now. However, the cooling is greatly reduced. I pummeled these for a few hours and could not get them to overheat in anything resembling a normal condition. I was running these HARD, very heavy dubstep at levels that became physically uncomfortable to be in the same room. They didn't come close to overheating. The only way I was able to get the temperatures to spike was to run them full out for over 10 minutes. Let me tell you, this wasn't fun. I turned off three of the amps, so I only had one enclosure and one amp running. The lights for -4 were on, and I turned up the knob another 3db. I finally was able to push it into uncomfortable territory. Beating on them for hours, I was only able to push it up to 73C at most. I was able to push it over 90 going flat out. The unmodified amp was on average 15-20C cooler. I didn't notice any performance decreases during any of this, and I would have pushed the amp further if I wasn't worried about melting the VC's of my very expensive drivers.
So, 300-400ohm resistor (using wire wound 5w) and 60mm fan and then an 80mm fan. It takes two of each of those per amp. Pics here, writeup here.
Here are some pics I've accrued from Sanway, and some pics of what I received. They shipped the amps DHL and they got here in 3-4 days. You can see their other clones on their alibaba page which also links to their real page. You can also email them at sanway.audio@gmail.com .
Pics from me:
Pics from Sanway:
(older version)
Price List
Pictures of the 10000Q were also posted. It is very similar and looks to possibly use the same power supply with different amp modules.
I'm relinking the pictures here. Thanks DL86.