Multichannel amps that can drive low impedances?

Correct Sogood51...Three CarverPro ZR1600 will give you six channels for less than three grand.

I had an experience where I screwed up the wiring in some speaker cables so that a short of about one ohm existed. Paralleled with this was the 4 ohm Maggie. Would you believe that the darned thing kept on playing reasonably well so that I had a bit of a time finding the problem. It did shut down for a few seconds every so often due to the self-protect feature, but in between shutdowns the sound was almost normal.

Thanks for all responses so far--yes, there are dips to 1 ohm, not actually 1 ohm rated like the Scintillas. Efficiency is in the mid-80s, so huge power is not needed.

You do mean dips to 1ohm I hope? He is not building some Apogee Scintilla clones is he?

$3,000 may be tuff to find something but another $500 or less should find him an Sunfire Cinema Grand Signature II on the used market. With it's power-tracking technology and huge power output (over 400X5) watts a channel it should be up to the job if he's building the former and not the later I asked about above.

How efficient will his design be? This could bring many amps into or out of the running.

Some of the new digital amps have no problem with even the Apogee Scintilla but $3,000 won't work unless the Carver digital pro amp will work? I know nothing mush about the Carver except it is fairly cheap to buy and is said to have no problem driving Maggies at 4ohm.

Dave

Please see the following link - not all amps can drive a 1 ohm load.

http://www.quadesl.org/Amplifiers/body_amplifiers.html

ANY solidstate amplifier will drive a 1-Ohm load. The question is just how much current (hence power) can the amp deliver into 1 Ohm. Some SS amps will double twice to 2 Ohms but I'll bet very few of them will double again in 1 Ohm. The class-A-biased Lazarus HA-1-series amps will double twice into 2, from 50wpc/8 to 100wpc/4 to 200wpc/2. The Proceed BPA- and HPA-series amps will double at least once into 4 while starting with 125pc and 250pc, respectively, into 8 and are available in 2- and 3-channel versions.

What is this guy building--something with 'dozens' of drivers in parallel?
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Well I know the Bryston 7B can be wired for 3ohms and below. Not so sure about their other amps especially their 3ch and 5ch amps. Contact Bryston and they should be able to tell you whether it'll work.