Glory days...
I still remember how in the early 70's the bass player in our band got one of those new-fangled MonoBloc amps.
Before that he had tried Fenders, Ampegs and whatever and was never happy. So he bought the Mono and one of the new Traynor graphic EQ's, with all them slider things. He was getting happier, but still not satisfied.
So we built him a pair of Altec A7 clones, with 15" EV's inside. We stacked the pair with the bottom cab facing the wall. It used the wall as a passive radiator and the top blew out front in the conventional manner.
He loved it! He threw the EQ away, jacked his Jazz bass straight into the MonoBloc and just wailed! Women all through the club would smile as he thumped those low notes!
A7's are so efficient that he never had to turn the amp past 2! These are the speaker bins that were used for decades in movie theatres. A pair would cover the entire audience, with the 15" drivers rated at only 75 watts. Today the marketing hype is to run smaller cabs with 400 watt or more speakers. You need to run that kind of power because the efficiency just sucks in comparison. The salesman sides with your wife to buy itty-bitty bookshelf speakers and then you have to buy a 300watt receiver to listen to them in your apartment!
I've had to clean spiders and dust out of a lot of Monoblocs but I've never had a transistor failure. The easiest way to kill a solid state amp is to never keep your cords in good shape and have one short out the speaker output sometime! Most modern amps will give some protection but the early models like this one would just pop a transistor or two.
If your speakers were powerful enough you'd hear a LOUD hum but the amp would pop its circuit breaker before the speakers blew. Unless you were running speakers rated for less than the amp, that you always made sure was never turned up too high. THEN the DC in the speaker line would fry them toute suite!
The previous negative opinion in this thread is the first bad review I've ever heard in my entire life as to the sound of this amp. Maybe I just don't get out much...
