I've been hearing some rumblings that the older trans-ana rockford fosgate amps have MUCH more quality/efficiency/power output than the more modern ones (last three or four years). How much truth is there to this? Is it really worth searching out the older amps, or is the difference really that big?

I'm really just curious 'cause I'd like to know more about why/if this is really the case, so ANY information or experiences would be great. Thanks.

 

Here is some of the problem. "In the day", Rockford would underate the crap out of everything they made. So a "40 x 2" would actually put out something like 90 x 2, so people would be like "h0ly shiit, that 80 watt amp putts out a ton of power".

Then came best buy. Now you had people making stuff to fit a price point (best buy says "we need a amp that retails for $199, $249, $299, etc." and they build more to fit each price point.) Top it off, the amps not as underated as before, are somewhat uglier, and they seem to have cut some corners (I have a repair tech at work who I'm friends with.... brilliant guy, can install stereos, repair stereos, and rebuild an engine from scratch. I showed him an old 360.6 amp that I had bought and he commented that it looked nice. Some of the newer ones seem to have glued the output transistors to the heatsink with some sort of permanent glue. On my amp, they have a bar holding these down. Something breaks and they can pull it apart and then put it back together after you fix it. With the new ones, you break something, and its permanently attached. Not sure how you would fix something like that.

Juan

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1987 Pontiac Trans Am
1994 Nissan Sentra E
1999 Daewoo Leganza

 

Well, as long as the actual performance qulaity hasn't gone down, I think I'll stick to the newer ones. Some of those older Trans-Ana's look a little long in the tooth, and they still demand a fairly high price.

Thanks for the info, it hadn't really been explained to me before and I couldn't understand why some of the older amps just blew away the new ones.