Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE: Crown Digital B Chain

This is topic Crown Digital B Chain in forum Film Handlers' Forum at Film-Tech Forum ARCHIVE.

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Posted by Mark Gulbrandsen (Member # 72) on 02-01-2006, 02:18 PM:

Anyone out there install any of these yet? Sure makes good sense but what about reliability, sound quality, etc? Any comments anyone?

Thanks!
Mark

Posted by Gordon McLeod (Member # 33) on 02-01-2006, 04:42 PM:

Since it is from crown I tend to stay away from it

Posted by Matt Fields (Member # 3211) on 02-01-2006, 07:21 PM:

Whats wrong with Crown? I've never worked with Crown stuff before.

Posted by Mark Gulbrandsen (Member # 72) on 02-01-2006, 07:22 PM:

Matt,

Nothing really..... To me amplifier companies are like the airlines..... Its the same risk no matter which one you get on.
Actually Crown has been very reliable in this part of the world. I would say that Ashley has been the most reliable for us with only fans in them being replaced. I repair way more QSC's in house than I do any other brand and I would say that amp brands are pretty evenly spread through out the mountain states without just about everything under the sun. Seems that at least some QSC's suffer more from age because of certain design aspects than do other models.... and there are alot of ten plus year old QSC's out here! In fact we keep at least one or two QSC rebuild kits in the parts dept here so we can do fast turn arounds.

As for the Digital B chain I was more interested in hearing about sound quality and flexibility of the thing. I have no doubt that it works well....

P.S. I am not knocking QSC blantly here, they are decent amps so those of you that are going to get in here and jump on the QSC is the best thing since sex thing better be able to substantiate that claim as I can substantiate the performance of a number of popular older models with data and photos of distortion content(before and after rebuilding)which might surprise some of you. Yes they are reliable in their lifespan... which I find somewhat shorter than others but they are also really nothing to write home about in the performance dept. Just average amplifiers.

Mark

Posted by Tony Bandiera Jr (Member # 2365) on 02-01-2006, 10:32 PM:

Overall, I liked the Crown D-Series amps, very clean-sounding and overall rugged, but when they suffered any kind of driver transistor/output transistor failure, (a rare event) it put the full DC power supply rail across the speaker terminals!! Once shot a woofer clean out of the basket! Never cared for the MicroTech and Macro-Tech amps, though.

QSC's have served me pretty well, and thier service support has always been excellent in my experience. Usually got most out-of-warranty Series Ones and MX amps repaired for around $80-120 with decent turn-around. (I've gotten too lazy to fix 'em myself.)