Yeah, I know how you feel. Right now I'm using a Nelson Pass designed First Watt J2 amplifier. It's pure class A and runs HOT. In my small office/listening room it can make the room nice and toasty. I'm also reviewing the Schiit Freya pre-amp at the moment and this thing runs even hotter! It's the tube gain stage that creates most of the heat. Luckily it's still spring and nights are cool. The combination of these two in the summer would be too much.
My RS4500 doesn't even warm my room up. But, I have 12' tall ceilings, a ceiling fan, and my theater is 388 square feet ( excluding the projector closet ) and about 3547 cubic feet. With the AC on, it would take a lot to warm the room up much. Plus, I vent the projector hot air right out of the separate closet, which helps.Our house is all 2 x 6 construction, heavily insulated, and stays about as cool as possible, even in summer.
Craig, one of these days I have to get over to your place. I'm only 45 minutes from you and I'm in Sac a lot for business.
I'm seriously thinking of building the DIY Audio version of Pass' Aleph J amp and oddly enough, was considering the Freya.Other than hot, what do you think about this combination?I currently have an old Yamaha C60 preamp and an Adcom GFA-555 for my two-channel system. It works great, just looking to change things up a bit.
Parasound amps are outstanding. I had and A51 and A21 for a time, but in the summer they put off way too much heat in my room (Northern California gets quite hot). I ended up switching to ATI's digital amps (NCore) and they do an amazing job as well, but don't put off nearly as much heat. In fact, they rarely get to 100 degrees where the A51 and A21 would go north of 120 degrees.
This is why my rack of amps sit in a mechanical room below the theater.
I'm not getting that much heat off of the A52+. And I check the Aircom temp.
I have been testing out my Parasound A 52+ for about a week in my home theater. I have a Denon X8500 running 13 Martin Logan 4 ohm Motion speakers ( 2 Motion 40’s, 1 Motion SLM XL center speaker, 4 Motion FX surrounds, 2 Motion LX16 wide channel speakers, 4 Motion 4 height speakers, and 4 SVS subwoofers ). I have been running my Motion 40's with an Emotiva XPA 200 I've had since the Denon 4520 days. Now I'm using the A 52+ to run the L / C / R and wide channel speakers, and letting the X8500 run the heights and surrounds. The difference last night watching the Mission: Impossible – Fallout 4K Blu-ray ( excellent Atmos sound track by the way ) was noticed by all my guests. The extra headroom just seems to give a cleaner, less fatiguing sound. Even cranked to 78 on my Denon ( which is pretty loud in my theater ). So far I think the A 52+ is the perfect compliment for my receiver. I also installed AC Infinity Aircom T10 cooling fans, and the amp and X8500 never got much over 80 degrees, even after 2 1/2 hours of " Fallout " 13 channels of Atmos audio hammerfest ! This is a great amp ! I think I can stop upgrading stuff in my theater for a while now !