Running Benchmark AHB2 in bridged mode and 4 Ohm Speaker

I think you’d be hard pressed to find a better sounding amp period, much less for the money. I auditioned a number of amps through my dealer who had 20.1s in a show room with various amp configurations over the years including some uber expensive equipment such as Boulder 3050 Monoblocks. I read about the innovative design of the Bencmark amps and gave them a try. I don’t plan on ever letting them go. I now hear only the music recording rather than the equipment which I feel we audiophiles get caught up in more often then not. I have my 20.1 Maggie’s bi-amped with Benchmark amps and can get much louder than I can comfortably listen before I run into clipping. They both run in stereo mode . . . Geek101 I think you’d be impressed with the output of one amp and would try it before getting a second. That being said, it’s your system and John has said that two mono amps will work well. Please tell us what you think. It would be nice to hear your experience of driving the system with one stereo vs. dual mono Benchmark amps. 

- Steve

That’s so scary Kijanki, I too hope it comes back.

Love all your knowledge that you all have been speaking to. When building my system I considered more Benchmark amps and read a lot of discussion similar to your thread so I bought two and thought I could always get four if needed. I had completed the system in a tiny place in Cali and moved to a huge space now and got the system set up the way it should be. When showing off to friends and the occasional maintenance guy I would get my Maggie’s to clip and could hear it happening if I pushed them. So here I am thinking I may need more power. I would also get my Pass X-250 (going to my main subs) to bury the bias needle in large transients and movies especially. I have been so crazy with work I couldn’t get everything set up right. After my system was hit my lightening and bought a P15 to protect it the Pass would pull too much power and shut down the P15. I started plugging the amp into the wall directly at each listening session as everything was before the lightening and pulling it out afterwards. . .

So about out three weeks ago I was able to sit down and do room correction with REW and MSO adding in my SVS subs. Which by the way made the house and windows shake when I turned them on so bad that I literally jumped off the couch because they scared my soul, the water on my table had the ripples, and my wife jumped out of the shower upstairs yelling that lightening/thunder just shook the house and I needed to shut down the system and unplug it because lightening was in the area. Anyway I started with 4 and ended up getting to 12 biquad filters going in my Mini DSP and with some playing around got things to sound amazing. I noticed now with the room correction how much more accurate the music was and how little the subs had to work to make the transients that sent everything clipping before, now playing at -15 for movies and -20 for music.

Now I don’t come close to clipping playing louder than I would ever listen but do in demo mode on any amps + have everything running off of my P15. The power needle barely moves. . . With all the speakers running full range (obviously MSO attenuated the subs naturally). Who would have guessed it. FYI you barely hear the system upstairs now with all the subs working together even though everything is more impactful.

So what I’m saying is if your having clipping issues look at your room nodes, buy four quality subs, play with some room correction and placement of the subs and the power argument will become a moot point. I’m happy to answer any questions if people want to try this path.