I recently bought a pair of Audiolab 8300mb monoblock amps and installed them and they've been running "OK".
I always felt that the idle power consumption (turned on but not playing music) was incredibly high for what are supposed to be efficient class D amplifiers (around 100W for both) and that the amount of heat they produced was excessive, again for what I thought of as being efficient class D amplifiers.
At first the 8300mbs were at the bottom of my stack, with the pre-pro and other amplifiers above that, the audiolabs would produce so much heat that the screen on my pre-pro was 'hot' to the touch, I started becoming concerned about possible heat damage to the pre-pro.
Eventually I got around to moving the 8300mbs out from the stack and placed them on the floor. At this point I realized that the amp powering the right speaker was the one running hot and the other channel amp was cold to the touch. Interesting, so they didn't both run hot and the behavior was different between then.
To troubleshoot the difference in heat, I decided to swap the amps around, i.e. left and right inputs and speakers switched to different amps. At this point I powered the amps on again and there was an incredibly scary loud bzzzzzzt sound from one of my speakers and I immediately powered the amp down again. I "think" it was the amp that was previously running hot but at that point I was just super annoyed after a long frustrating day and then also having been lugging around heavy amps to change everything around, so I just turned everything off and left it be.
Next step (tonight if I feel up to it) I will take the amp which previously ran hot and connect an old speaker that I'm willing to sacrifice to the output, with no input connected and power it on again. If I heart bzzzzzt or my speaker blows up I will try to return the amplifier as I feel that's a conclusive test to take a known working speaker and connect it to the amp without any input.
Friends and family have suggested that I just plugged the amp in incorrectly, causing the fault. I don't think this is possible since I'm using RCA inputs, which cannot be connected incorrectly, it's just a single plug that you plug into the only available RCA hole on the back of the amp. Similarly the speaker connections are only one set of binding posts for + and - and even if you swap them around the speaker will just be acoustically out of phase, it cannot damage anything. There are no configuration switches on the amplifier besides switching between balanced or RCA input connectors (they're set correctly, but even if they weren't, it cannot cause a fault in my opinion).
I always felt that the idle power consumption (turned on but not playing music) was incredibly high for what are supposed to be efficient class D amplifiers (around 100W for both) and that the amount of heat they produced was excessive, again for what I thought of as being efficient class D amplifiers.
At first the 8300mbs were at the bottom of my stack, with the pre-pro and other amplifiers above that, the audiolabs would produce so much heat that the screen on my pre-pro was 'hot' to the touch, I started becoming concerned about possible heat damage to the pre-pro.
Eventually I got around to moving the 8300mbs out from the stack and placed them on the floor. At this point I realized that the amp powering the right speaker was the one running hot and the other channel amp was cold to the touch. Interesting, so they didn't both run hot and the behavior was different between then.
To troubleshoot the difference in heat, I decided to swap the amps around, i.e. left and right inputs and speakers switched to different amps. At this point I powered the amps on again and there was an incredibly scary loud bzzzzzzt sound from one of my speakers and I immediately powered the amp down again. I "think" it was the amp that was previously running hot but at that point I was just super annoyed after a long frustrating day and then also having been lugging around heavy amps to change everything around, so I just turned everything off and left it be.
Next step (tonight if I feel up to it) I will take the amp which previously ran hot and connect an old speaker that I'm willing to sacrifice to the output, with no input connected and power it on again. If I heart bzzzzzt or my speaker blows up I will try to return the amplifier as I feel that's a conclusive test to take a known working speaker and connect it to the amp without any input.
Friends and family have suggested that I just plugged the amp in incorrectly, causing the fault. I don't think this is possible since I'm using RCA inputs, which cannot be connected incorrectly, it's just a single plug that you plug into the only available RCA hole on the back of the amp. Similarly the speaker connections are only one set of binding posts for + and - and even if you swap them around the speaker will just be acoustically out of phase, it cannot damage anything. There are no configuration switches on the amplifier besides switching between balanced or RCA input connectors (they're set correctly, but even if they weren't, it cannot cause a fault in my opinion).
