Bdgregory: I've owned several different B&K amps and never seen that info either. Then again, these were all older amps and B&K was never much on owner's manuals per se, hence my questions to Jeffrey.
As to running one channel of an amp, this is an old trick that i first saw back in the late 1970's. The first company that i knew to recommend such a thing was Quad. So many of their dealers had found this approach to work better with their 405 series amps that Quad actually came out with a monoblock version of the amp.
While this is nothing to brag about, the fact of the matter is that an amp that drastically improves in terms of output power and / or electrical performance from taking such an approach is simply an under-designed amp. That is, the power supply of the amp is current limited. By removing the current demands of one channel from the power supply, the remaining channel can now function at closer to peak performance.
As to "dual mono" amps improving from this, the answer would be yes and no. It all depends on how stiff the power supply for each channel really is. That is, one can have a separate feed for each channel, but if each feed is still too small, you're still starving the amp. Disconnecting one channel won't solve this so much as stiffening the power supply would.
By "stiffening" the supply, i'm talking about upgrading the transformer to something with a measurably greater amount of current capacity and / or adding increased amounts of power supply reserve via a larger bank or quantity of total filter capacitance. Such an approach increases dynamics and allows a more transparent presentation, even during the most difficult passages. It is not uncommon to find that amps that can drive very difficult loads with the greatest of ease tend to have very high current capacity and large reserves of it available on demand. The only way to get this is to have a big transformer and a lot of capacitance, hence the greater size and cost. Sean
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As to running one channel of an amp, this is an old trick that i first saw back in the late 1970's. The first company that i knew to recommend such a thing was Quad. So many of their dealers had found this approach to work better with their 405 series amps that Quad actually came out with a monoblock version of the amp.
While this is nothing to brag about, the fact of the matter is that an amp that drastically improves in terms of output power and / or electrical performance from taking such an approach is simply an under-designed amp. That is, the power supply of the amp is current limited. By removing the current demands of one channel from the power supply, the remaining channel can now function at closer to peak performance.
As to "dual mono" amps improving from this, the answer would be yes and no. It all depends on how stiff the power supply for each channel really is. That is, one can have a separate feed for each channel, but if each feed is still too small, you're still starving the amp. Disconnecting one channel won't solve this so much as stiffening the power supply would.
By "stiffening" the supply, i'm talking about upgrading the transformer to something with a measurably greater amount of current capacity and / or adding increased amounts of power supply reserve via a larger bank or quantity of total filter capacitance. Such an approach increases dynamics and allows a more transparent presentation, even during the most difficult passages. It is not uncommon to find that amps that can drive very difficult loads with the greatest of ease tend to have very high current capacity and large reserves of it available on demand. The only way to get this is to have a big transformer and a lot of capacitance, hence the greater size and cost. Sean
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