Why are they doing this?


Kinda vague, huh? I'll elaborate. I have Emotiva XPA-1 monoblocks driving Magnapan 20.7's. Before that they were powering Mag 3.7's. They are 1000 watts into 4ohms. They never clipped. I did play them loud but not ridiculously loud. These amps have blue led meter lights that move in sync with the amp output and they would peak a little passed halfway. Occasionally a bit higher. Recently I added a pair of REL G2 subwoofers. They are connected one left and one right as per the manual. That would be to the speaker posts on the amps with the supplied neutrik cable. Upon connecting the subs, the blue led's no longer move. (Yes, I've checked the switch that turns these on and off) Also, three times now, the amps have clipped, once left channel and twice right channel. It was at a pretty good volume but not where it was outrageous. I talked to a tech at Emotiva and first off, he had no knowledge of REL subs and how they are connected. After I explained it he was kinda at a loss for words having obviously never heard of connecting subs to the speaker posts on the amps. His explanation for what was happening was that the subs are 4ohm and the 20.7's are 4ohm so that's driving the load down to 2ohms and that's causing the clipping and the amps cannot detect 2ohms so that's why the led's are not functioning. If this is true then Rel subs cannot be used with any 4ohm speaker or the same problem will occur. I'll be honest, when you start talking ohms splitting and other electronic stuff I tend to get lost. Anybody care to take a stab at this?

mrschret

Showing 2 responses by mrschret

Al, your explanation is great. I did see just what you showed from the Emo manual. I also saw in the REL manual that there is a different way to connect them to amps like these but the connection shown in the manual was for a two channel amp, not monoblocks so I wasn't sure if it would work on them. As soon as I can get the chance I will make the change. Even with my limited knowledge I was pretty sure what the Emo tech was telling me was wrong. Thank you for your help.
Very much appreciate the feedback here. To bring things up to date, I contacted REL and their answer was exactly what Al says here in the last post. Take the red and yellow wires, twist them together and attach to the positive post on each amp. Take the black wire and attach to a chassis screw for grounding. Ok, so that I don't seem like a complete idiot, the REL manual does show this connection for fully balanced amps and I DID look at it. My problem was that it shows only for a single sub and not monoblock amps. I didn't want to take a chance and connect them this way unless I was completely sure it was safe. So, that's the way their connected now and everything works fine. The led's are even metering again.
As for the suggestion to connect the RCA plug, maybe that would be a good way but I really don't think the folks at REL intended for anyone that bought their subs to have to go through those extra steps. I did learn soething here though and I thank you for that.