I've always been wondering about crown amps. They look to have mind-boggling power output at a bargain basement price. I've never heard one so my question is; does anyone here own a crown amp and if so, what is your experience with it? The high-end audiophile sites all seem to say the same thing which is that crown amps are "not suitable" for audiophile use because (presumably) they have poor sound quality. I can get a new one at guitar center by my house for about 1k that's rated at (I think) 600wpc. It's pretty ugy and industrial looking. But still 600 watts!!!!!! Less than a thousand $.
I just read Amir's review of the crown XLS2502 and he seems very positive about it.
Crown have made many different types of amps and its not the company it once was, now owned by Harman.
I have owned a Studio Reference II power amplifier since 1994, still going strong, a very well built amplifier designed for recording studio's or for mastering and to drive large main monitors, (it is not a P.A. amplifier for live concerts),
Came with its own specific Left / Right channel test bench measurements (from memory 124 & 122 dB S/N ratio on each).
It can be changed to bridged mono or parallel mono, depending if requiring current or voltage.
It's a class A/B design, weight 28kg, and when configured as stereo, puts out 360 Watts RMS into 8 ohms 560 into 4 ohms, safe to drive 2 ohm load.
There is also a Crown Studio Reference I, which has double the power of my II model, the earlier versions were called Macro Reference, the old Audio magazine used one to test speakers.
There days the majority of studio's are using powered monitors, so the market for these amplifiers isn't there anymore.
For the curious, the manual and schematic are still available from crowns website.
I don't think they're very expensive these days, would be interesting to see Amirm test one.