Leave amps on?


I know this has been covered before but I have a particular question. I have a CJ 350 and Gamut 200 and leave them on. When in idle the CJ heat sinks get hot and the Gamut do not. The Gamut is a mosfet , the CJ is not. The Gamuts [5s] are low impedance; when I used Spendors the CJ did not get hot. Does the impedance of the speakers make them draw more current even idle? The Gamuts are designed for the speakers which are quite low impedance. This is a good one for you Al.
stanwal

Showing 1 response by atmasphere

The impedance of the speaker can easily make a difference. In some cases can change the class of operation too (lower impedance pushes the amps more towards the B region; yet another reason to avoid low impedance speakers if possible).

With a lower impedance load more current can flow through the output devices at idle. Since they already have a quiescent current (idle current), depending on how hard the output circuit is biased ('hard' meaning more bias current; perhaps the designer wanted more than just one or two watts of operation in the Class A region) reducing the load impedance can easily raise the temperature. I think you will find that with the other amp on the same load that it runs warmer too, just not so much that you notice it.