It's here and I have opened the box, then the spring-time honey-dos started. I can't believe I have a new amp in a box and can't get time to hook it up.

I also need a new rack for this amp (heavy and big). I'm thinking about getting a furniture dolly from Lowe's and fitting a rack to it.

Hardware: I have two Monster Power 3250 amps, one for the fronts and one for the rears. They are powering four JBL E90 speakers and a JBL EC35 center speaker. The amps are hooked up to a Yamaha HTR-5990 receiver with two 25 foot component cables. I researched using the component cables before using them and found out the following. Everybody said it would work fine, but I shouldn't use audio RCA cables for video because video uses higher frequencies. The HTPC is hooked up to the Yamaha with a digital coax cable. All music and DVDs are played on the HTPC. I have had the amps for about two months now and have made the following observations.

Movie Sound Quality: Sounds all around better than the amp(s) built into the Yamaha HTR-5990. Any loud action movie scene that require a lot of wattage sound much better. Gun shots, explosions and car crashes sound much more realistic. For example, the shotgun firing in the movie A History Of Violence was impressive.

Music Sound Quality: High quality recordings such as Surfacing by Sarah McLachlan and Velvet Rope by Janet Jackson sound really good. The clarity of Sarah McLachlan's voice is very impressive. Low quality, low bitrate or old mp3s sound just as described.

Problem #1: I experienced the ground loop problem that was discussed in this thread. I fixed it by plugging the amps power cords into the same surge protector that the Yamaha receiver is plugged into.

Problem #2: The right rear rack mounting fin is bent inwards. This made it difficult to remove from the foam packaging and it will make it difficult to mount if I want to in the future. I called monster and they said they would be willing to replace it. I just haven't done it yet because I didn't want to be without a amp when I first received them.

Problem #3: This is the most annoying / disapointing problem with the amps. The three LCDs on the front that are supposed to display the watt usage in real time have two problems. One, they don't seem to work accurately. They barely register when watching movies and listening to music with the receiver volume set at -45 to -25. If I turn the volume to -20 on the yamaha receiver I can get it to register up to 10.0 watts with Janet's Velvet Rope CD. Janet's CD was recorded louder than most of my other CDs. However, I don't normally listen to music that loud. Most of the time the amps display .2 to 3.0 watts. I hooked up my Creative Zen nomad mp3s player directly to one of the amps and turned it all the way up which resulted in 7 to 8 watts being displayed. I called monster support and they suggested hooking up a normal DVD player to my receiver because the line level out on computers isn't as loud as a normal DVD. Laugh, I explained to the the tech that it wouldn't matter because I was using a digital coax conection but he just ignored me. Maybe he doesn't know that digital is simply 0s and 1s. Anyway, I tried a regular DVD using RCA audio connections and got the same results. The tech from the place I bought it suggested turning up the preouts on receiver. I did that and it improved the problem a little; it will now display 0 to 3 watts most of the time instead of just 0. So I am not sure what to do, the amps sound great, which is there main purpose, but much of the time the LCDs display 000.0.

The other problem with the LCDs is they flicker when displaying the wattage at louder levels. My old techniques receiver would do this because it simply didn't have enough power. But these amps are supposedly 250 watts per channel.

It would have been nice to talk to a monster tech who has actually used the amps... I gave up calling monster tech support because it was obvious that they were not familiar with the 3250. Hopefully somebody that actually has a 3250 can share with me how well the LCD wattage meters on their 3250 work. A guy commented on a different thread that he didn't think the meters were all that accurate on the 2 channel 2250 but he did not specify what numbers were being displayed.

I suppose the problem could be that the preout line level from the yamaha isn't loud enough for the monster amp to correctly calculate the wattage. I had a 5790 prior to the 5990 and the sub preout was quieter than normal even when it was turned up all the way. The best buy service center said there was nothing wrong with it so I sold it and bought the 5990. The sub pre-out on the 5990 sounds good without having to turn it up all the way.

I had the Monster amp as I stated before in this thread and thought the same as you that the displays were not working. In reality the power needed for to run efficient speakers in a average size room is much less then I think most people realize. I was running mine with the outlaw 970 and I had to turn mine up to -5 or so to get 10 to 15 watts to appear on the meters. This was with music cds and it was deafing in my 10x15 room. I could not get the meters to show even 1 watt while watching SW Episode 3 until it was so loud I would have sworn I was in the battle. The reason that the displays flicker with higher out put is because these tend to be dynamic moments that require lots of watts quickly which large amps like the monster or the outlaws have in reserve. These peaks last for only an instant so that is why the the numbers seem to flicker due to the fact that the amp is outputing this power for only a split second. I would imagine that your amps and the 5990 are working just fine.

I was thinking something along those lines myself, rdperry. Out of curiousity, what speakers were you using with the Monster?

I am using a set of polk rti100's that have a sensitivity of 91 dbl I think. I sent a pm to a guy on AVS forum and he confirmed that his experience with the displays was similar to mine in that he had to really crank up the volume to get the the readout to show many watts at all.

Consider the sensitivity rating. Usually it means the SPL level at 1 meter from the speaker when driven by 1 Watt of power. So you only need 1 W to get the 91 db SPL, which is pretty loud.

People who are used to the amps with needle or bar meters are likely to be familiar with this. However, I always thought it was going to be a problem using a number display, because the value changes too fast to see it. The same reason they are not that popular in cars, some cars that have them tend to also have a bar graph display too.

Hi Bug,
Any update on the 3250?

Just curious to hear your thoughts.

Cheers,
Kgt

kgt,

I am running Axiom 4 ohm M80s for mains and 2 M3s in parallel, (=4 ohm) for centers.

The 80s are rated:

SPL in Room 1w/1m(dB): 95 dB
SPL Anechoic 1w/1m(dB): 91 dB

As reported above, the readouts show 2 or less most of the time. The most I've seen was high 20s during the Master/Commander gun scene while listening at 88-90 spl. The mains are set to small, btw.

I have yet to see the speakers, amps (Monster and 3 monoblocks), Denon, DVD and TV pull more that 6 amps. The sub is on the same circuit but not on the power center yet.

I am impressed with the amp so far. I hope to get some additional listening this weekend. I hosted an auditon last weekend, so I didn't get a lot of my music and HT time.

The gentleman here was truly impressed with what he heard. Great sound reproduction was his comment. The system was driven to high volume levels with no distortion and the amps never got warm.

More next week.

Doug

Thanks Bug.

Now that you've had the amp up and running for a few weeks, how do you feel about it? How does it compare to your monoblocks?

Cheers.

I haven't had time to write a review. My son will be here this weekend. Hopefully we can get some thoughts down.

I think the Monster may be a little more responsive than the monoblocks. But not much. It may be between my ears.

It take so little power to run my Axioms that the Monster readings hardly move much during casual listening, mostly 000s. During a hard workout, HT, they seem to jump between 0 and 20 watts.

Bug