Hi Spiker,

Based on my experiments, I do not believe that the PE 1000w plate amp is defective. As I indicated in an earlier post, the popular 250w plate amps take the signal for the auto turn-on circuitry at the point where the two low level stereo input channels are summed together which, naturally, is ahead of the plate amp gain control. In the case of the PE 1000w plate amp, I found that when the plate amp gain (set at 5) and the LFE signal from the pre/pro (set at -5db) are set up to give a +75db subwoofer SPL at the Dolby reference volume level for the pre/pro, the subwoofer auto turn-on will not work when listening to normal music levels. I found that I could get the subwoofer to auto turn-on at normal music listening levels by upping the gain control level on the plate amp. This indicates to me that the signal being used to feed the auto turn-on circuit is coming from the gain control circuit. This results in the auto turn-on level being dependent not only on the LFE signal level from the pre/pro, but also on the setting of the plate amp gain control. This is not good circuit design if you want the auto turn-on circuit to only respond to the LFE signal level which is the way that the popular 250w plate amps are designed.
Regards,
TCIII

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If you are going to send someone to save the world, you better make sure they like it the way it is.

Hi all,

If you were thinking about purchasing the new PE 500w plate amp, think again. I just received an email from a fellow audio enthusiast and he is having the same LFE low level turn-on problem that I have being having with the PE 1000w plate amp. Sounds like they both have the same auto turn-on circuit configuration.
Sean, at tech support for PE, told me that they will mail me a copy of the schematic of the new 1000w plate amp as soon as they get it from the manufacturer. Hopefully I can modify the auto turn-on circuit to a configuration that closely duplicates the auto turn-on circuit design of PE's popular 250w plate amp.
Regards,
TCIII


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If you are going to send someone to save the world, you better make sure they like it the way it is.