Crown D-150A Series II Professional Power Amplifier Untested

Description: The Crown D-150A Series II is an extremely high quality professional stereophonic power amplifier. It's rated at 80 watts per channel (WPC), and like all American amplifiers, puts out much more than that. This amplifier sold for the equivalent $1,500 when new; this is a first-class professional product built to last a lifetime. The Crown D-150A Series II is the grandson of the 75 WPC Crown D 150 of 1971, which was rated at 75 watts per channel. 75 times two equals 150, its model number. It was introduced as a sane version of the beastly DC-300, but still with more than enough power for home Hi-Fi and studio monitoring use at an even more reasonable price, still with all the performance of the DC-300. This is a bulletproof amplifier built to tough commercial, not consumer, standards. It has solid metal knobs, glass-epoxy circuit boards and a three-year no-fault warranty — with Crown paying the shipping if it fails. Crown proclaims in the manual that it "should provide you with a lifetime of trouble-free service." I haven't tried, but I certainly believe it would take quite a few rounds from a 22-calibre rifle before it had any problems. As a testament to its tenure in major studios, you'll see it has a certification label for the City of Los Angeles' electrical code. If you've ever built a studio in Hollywood, you'll sometimes have the inspector show up and expect everything to have this sticker on it. In this case, Crown has already gotten this approved to save you the hassles of dickering with inspectors. These don't break, which is why they have been so popular with touring rock bands as well as in recording studios. That also means that most of them you see today will have come off a long tour on the road, and are well worn to prove it. One of the subtle things that show how far Crown has gone to make this amplifier survive abuse is how little free space there is behind the front knobs. If you bang this amplifier into something, the knob won't be able to be pushed in far enough to damage its potentiometer; it may scrape the front panel but not bash-in the control behind it. Stress-testing this old sample at beyond clipping at 100 WPC steady-state at 3% THD for an hour with the IOC distortion indicators lit the whole time, it fried and burnt my test loads. My test loads got so hot they actually dripped solder and burnt my bench, but my D150A Series Two wasn't much warmer than usual and was completely unaffected. The D150A II has the perfect combination of size and power for home Hi-Fi use. It sells for pennies on the dollar today because the market is flooded with them. Touring bands are opting for lighter-weight class-D amplifiers to give them less to carry, and recording studios use active monitors with amplifiers built into the speakers. Thus as these come off tour or out of the studio, eBay is loaded with them. The D 150s are real class A+AB amplifiers and sound much better for Hi-Fi than the newer class-D garbage used on tour. These linear Crown amplifiers are also designed for efficiency so they don't get hot. They need no fan. They cool themselves through convection, radiation and conduction through their all-aluminum chassis — and have much less noise, distortion and flatter response than newer professional amplifiers. They will get not more than mildly warm after many, many hours, even sitting in a wood case as shown above. If you only use it for an hour at a time, it won't even get warm; it takes many hours to reach final operating temperature. It plays immediately when turned on. There's a big power surge drawn from the wall since there are no inrush protectors, but it does play immediately with no thumps. If you have no signal, it turns off silently. If you still have signal applied, it plays for several seconds with distortion, and then the distortion goes away and it plays for several more seconds softly as it fades out, maybe with a little bit of hiss after about 10 seconds without power. Odd for a professional amplifier, the D-150A Series II uses unbalanced ¼" jacks for inputs. These are not professional balanced inputs; they are simply tougher connectors than RCA jacks. Use two ¼" to RCA adapters and you're set. This is a true DC amplifier. Bass nuts take note: it really does amplify straight down to direct current with perfectly flat frequency response and zero phase shift. Even the best other amplifiers have about 20º of phase shift at the lowest end of the music band, but not this Crown DC amplifier. It uses internal temperature sensors to ensure that DC offset remains low regardless of operating temperature. There are adjustments inside for technicians to null it even farther if needed. It has no speaker protection should something go haywire upstream or internally; use speaker fuses in your wiring and no worries. The chassis and front panel are all solid aluminum extrusions. The power button merely moves an internal industrial click-on power switch, and the knobs are solid billet aluminum Unit is Untested, was plugged in & powered on fine.

Price: 129 USD

Location: Walls, Mississippi

End Time: 2024-08-06T03:35:40.000Z

Shipping Cost: 20 USD