This is a review and detailed measurements of the AmazonBasics Class D 80 Watt/channel power amplifier. It was kindly purchased new by a member and drop shipped to me. On Amazon, it cost US $128 but the owner found it on "Woot" for just $70. They are sold out there though.
Not a half-bad enclosure especially for the price:
It was so confusing to see dual languages on the front panel and the back:
I left the bass and treble controls as you see them there. For testing, I adjusted the gain to 29 dB which is my standard for testing.
Amazon Basics 80W Measurements
As usual, we feed the amplifier a 1 kHz tone with enough amplitude to produce 5 watts and see what we get:
Well, this is not good. Distortion (third harmonic) is quite high at around 68 dB causing the SINAD to be pretty close to the bottom of all the amps we have tested:
Frequency response showed high sensitivity relative to (speaker) load:
Crosstalk was horrible:
How the heck they screwed this up? The dashed line in teal is a $25 amplifier.
32-tone test shows what we saw in the dashboard more or less:
We can't clear 16 bit content even at max power:
Power curve shows early onset of distortion:
At least spec is met (at 4 ohm):
Sweeping with different frequencies we see distortion rises a lot with frequency:
Conclusions
I am a sucker for a bargain as much as the next person. But there comes a line that I hate to cross and this amplifier forces me to do so. There are just so many faults here. If you want to use it in a garage or workshop, it will be fine and run cooler than little desktop amps. That is the only positive thing I can say about it.
Needless to say, I can't recommend the Amazon Basics 80 Watt amplifier.
Edit: see teardown here: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/...azon-basics-80-watt-amplifier-teardown.20945/
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As always, questions, comments, recommendations, etc. are welcome.
Any donations are much appreciated using: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/how-to-support-audio-science-review.8150/
Not a half-bad enclosure especially for the price:
It was so confusing to see dual languages on the front panel and the back:
I left the bass and treble controls as you see them there. For testing, I adjusted the gain to 29 dB which is my standard for testing.
Amazon Basics 80W Measurements
As usual, we feed the amplifier a 1 kHz tone with enough amplitude to produce 5 watts and see what we get:
Well, this is not good. Distortion (third harmonic) is quite high at around 68 dB causing the SINAD to be pretty close to the bottom of all the amps we have tested:
Frequency response showed high sensitivity relative to (speaker) load:
Crosstalk was horrible:
How the heck they screwed this up? The dashed line in teal is a $25 amplifier.
32-tone test shows what we saw in the dashboard more or less:
We can't clear 16 bit content even at max power:
Power curve shows early onset of distortion:
At least spec is met (at 4 ohm):
Sweeping with different frequencies we see distortion rises a lot with frequency:
Conclusions
I am a sucker for a bargain as much as the next person. But there comes a line that I hate to cross and this amplifier forces me to do so. There are just so many faults here. If you want to use it in a garage or workshop, it will be fine and run cooler than little desktop amps. That is the only positive thing I can say about it.
Needless to say, I can't recommend the Amazon Basics 80 Watt amplifier.
Edit: see teardown here: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/...azon-basics-80-watt-amplifier-teardown.20945/
------------
As always, questions, comments, recommendations, etc. are welcome.
Any donations are much appreciated using: https://www.audiosciencereview.com/forum/index.php?threads/how-to-support-audio-science-review.8150/
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