Originally posted by 97teg
Yeah i see your point but also if you listen with your speakers off then you will actually get more power cause the inpit voltage can vary without varying the output which can be nice.
How do you listen with your speakers off? I'm going to assume that you meant car off?
If you have a healthy charging system, then you can assume that with the car on, both will see 14.4V. It's true that you will get more power from the JL with the car off though. But I drive my car, I don't listen to it parked very often. Also, these JL amps (b/c of the RIPS system) are total current hogs - putting an even larger strain on your charging system.
Form what ive read in testing (i know people are saying that is bias) but it pumped out 90 watts into a stright resistive load and will almost double its power when driving a reactive load like a speaker. That is just straight test numbers. In a reactive 4 ohm bridged load it put out 230 watts x 2. I think you would have to compair it to the arc 4050 and not the 4150.
I'd love to see the test. I'd also love to see the magazine where a huge 2 page JL advertisement followed the test.
Why would you compare the 4050? The 4050 is a 55w x 4 amp - that means that it is rated at 20W less per channel then the JL (a difference of 27%), while the 4150 is an 80W per channel amp - only 5W more per channel (a 7% advantage for the Arc). Seems to me like the 4150 is still a better comparison, unless you want to bias things toward the JL of course.
Even if I had a screw loose, and used the 4050 for a comparison, it still makes 180W when bridged to a 4 ohm mono load - that's still 30W
AHEAD of JL's rating. Rest assured that the Arcs are under-rated.
I never said the JL was a bad amp, and I'm not trying to start a JL v Arc war, I just find that for some applications, they plain suck. Especially for a system like I run. I use horns. JL doesn't make an amp in their slash series small enough to power them. I also use 2 ohm midbasses - again, I get no power benefit from running a 2 ohm midbass driver as I do with any other amp on the market.
It's a glass half empty/half full proposition - depends on how you want to look at it. For this particular application, I think the JL amps suck. For some other style systems, I would consider trying them.....