Bennett let me check out the amps a week or so ago at the expense of a 6 hr drive to Troy, NY! I loved the ride down Rt 7 in western Vt during fall foilage!
Anyway, I racked up the amps, first noticing the lack of banana plugs. Because of this fact I decided to run my Community tops full range. I did not have time to make a speakon adaptor that I could use to bi-amp my tops. I then set the voltage limiters to about twice what my tops and subs were rated for. So about 120V for the subs and 100V for the tops. I don't know if this was the correct way to do things, but I was short on time to research. I fired up half my rig in my shop to test things out. That is 2 Community XLT 46e tops and 2 Dth subs. I set the sub gain to most sensitivty and the tops three notches below. I don't remeber the settings right now.
First off, I have to say the most used terms in power amp advertising. My rig sounded extremely clean with limitsless headroom! I have used a wide variety of amps on my rig, but these were definitely the best! The subs were extremely tight upto the point where they started to fart out. A lot of other amps seemed to get mushy in the low end when pushed, but the Digam 10 was just coasting along, barely one light flickering! The same goes for the tops. I never run my tops full range, so I was a little leary about the sound not being what I was used to in bi-amp mode. A little eqing to bring out some low mid-meat and I didn't think twice about running full range.
O.K., so I got my rig tested out to make sure I wouldn't blow anything, and to get some baseline settings on the amps, crossover and eq. I load up and get to the gig the next day, early. It is a 250 person club. It used to be a Corvette museum, now it is a club/50's diner, very cool place and recently renovated to increase the dance floor. I set up a double stack aside and fire up the rig. On a very odd note, the night before, while testing the amps, the tops were reading about 5.2 ohm and the subs agout 4.8 ohm, with the ohms dropping as I pushed the volume. At the club, the amp used on the tops was now stating "unknown Z". The night before I had one side of the amp loaded and it calculated the load fine, now with both sides running, it would not calculate the load. I don't know?
I run my usual tuning music and played with the eq, crossover, etc, and let the rig run for about 4 hrs before the band was to arrive. I wanted to make sure everything was ok. I had 2 Digam 10's set to 15A breaker and 2 PLX 1602 (for monitors) on one breaker. I've never had a problem in the past running the whole rig on one breaker, that's usually 5 amps, PLX or Crest Pro200. No way to set a distro in the this room! I pushed the volume up and down to check headroom and such and once again I could get it completely clean up to the point of speaker distortion, just the subs though.
Band comes and we do a sound check, but I can't seem to get the vocals over the mix. I changed the amp sensitivity for the tops to one notch below the subs and the system really came alive!! The Community tops have a built in light bulb protection crap. I've been on gigs where the ports on the boxes would light up, when really pushing, but throughout the show there was not a hint that the boxes were being over powered. I was glad considering there was enough juice to send the voice coils into someone's forehead.
The gig was great with unlimited headroom and clean output. Once again I have to state that at other times with different amps, as I pushed the system, the sound would change as the amps ran closer to their max. The Digam 10's responded and sound the same throughout the entire range, from whispering to screaming.
Final note: Why no banana plugs? Different standards in Europe? The amp failed to calculate the load for some reason on my tops, but the subs were registering fine on the other amp. I had a problem with the metering. Like Bennett had said, the bar graph was just way too fast and I wish that the LED ladders on the amp would coincide with the limiter settings. The amp can put out tremendous ammounts of power, but I don't think I ever went past one LED for the tops and two for the subs. That really doesn't help me from across the room when checking the LED meters. I think that if I set the limiter to 100v, then the LED's should react with regards to that scale. Just a minor gripe, but the LED meters were useless to me otherwise.
That's my review, I hope it brings up some discussion.