The Red Headed Step-child of Amplifiers
Written: Oct 24 '00 (Updated Oct 28 '00)
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Product Rating:
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Pros: Inexpensive, Good output vs cost
Cons: Not stable into a 2ohm mono load, Relatively low power for subwoofers
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| slik1's Full Review: Rockford Fosgate Punch 250a2 Car Amp |
"Because it's always getting beaten." Anybody who tries to tell you that they bought this amp for competition or for sound-offs lied to you. It is not stable at 2ohms when bridged mono, a staple of competition amps and has a regulated power supply that doesn't jive well with the competition rating system.
Summary:
This amp is not the best for the money today and would not be a very smart consumer choice given the quality of today's amplifiers and Rockford's current place in the amplifier market. Rockford has been resting on it's laurels and has failed to make an amp that is as good as they claim.
Review:
I bought this amplifier about two years ago for a friend of mine. We installed it in his Jeep Cherokee and connected it to Two Rockford Punch XLC 10" subwoofers.
The amplifier is not stable into 2ohms which is the load you get when you run two 4ohm speakers in parallel. Unfortunately we had purchased two 4ohm subwoofers and rather than wire them up in series and achieve an 8ohm load we went with the lower 2ohm load wiring. The reason for this is when you reduce the resistance by half, you generally double the power.
This is partially true for this amp which when bridged is rated at 250 watts RMS into 4ohms mono. Now when you hook up two 4ohm speakers to this amp in stereo (one speaker a channel) the amp only puts out 62.5 watts each channel, hardly what one would want to be sent to their subwoofers. So our only choices were get two 8ohm subwoofers, wire them in parallel to achieve a 4ohm mono load, or run the amp unstable at 2ohms mono. Well, being cheap and in need of some quick gratification we wired up the two subs in parallel to the amp which ran in bridged mono mode. The amp was producing some decent bass, not crazy but what you would expect for about 250 watts of sub power.
Now here is where the problem came in. Because this amp is your average, mainstream, everyday, electronics chain-store amp, it was not designed to be stable at 2ohm bridged operation like many higher end amps are. This is not very good for the uneducated consumer because most every subwoofer you will find at these stores is 4ohms. When you buy two of them like most people do you are presented with quite a predicament. Do you run the amp stable at 8ohms producing 125 watts total RMS, or do you push it a little bit and run the whole thing at 2ohms producing about 250 watts RMS?
We decided to run it unstable at 2ohms bridged with pretty good results until it happened, "the music died." We were singing bye, bye Miss American Amplifier when we looked in the trunk to see what had happened. I reached down to touch the amp and it was SO HOT you could poach eggs on it! Now this is our fault for running the amp unstable and luckily the thermal protection circuitry kicked in saving the amp from frying. Now when the amp cooled down to a reasonable level it did come back on, and it is still working to this day but it's kinda tricky how most consumers will not know this amp cannot power their subs properly until it is too late. Since then it has overheated a few times, usually in the summer when music is played loudly for more then 20 minutes, but the point of a sound system is to have music whenever you want it for as long as you want it.
My recommendation is to do as much research as possible before entering the store as most clerks in those stores don't know much (I know, a lot of my friends work at these major chain electronics stores and I know more than all of them combined). Also it is better to do it right the first time rather than spending more and more money trying to correct your mistake.
If you are serious about getting into car audio you should skip right over Rockford. They make good products but they have become too mainstream. Because they are now sold in major chain stores they must directly compete with companies like Sony and Kenwood and therefore they have really watered down their whole like of amplifiers in order to provide a more inexpensive product. In the last few years they have been resting on the reputation they built during the late 80's and early 90's by no longer producing a higher quality product at a competitive price. This amp and many other low-end Rockford amps are just not the best value for the money, right now it seems to be the Phoenix gold XS series. They provide the most "Real World" power for your dollar and are "High Current" which means they'll better power your heavy subwoofers. Rockford's marketing and advertising won't power anything.
Please post any and all questions, comments, or product suggestions you have, I love to talk about car audio and would be glad to answer any questions you may have(or that I may have caused).
Recommended:
No
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Epinions.com ID:
slik1
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Reviews written: 2
Trusted by: 1 member
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