I got given some marketting materials about the new Schneider "Competition Series" sub amp on the weekend. In it they claim their new wonder amp to be Class T and that its digital. Reakon there's any weight to the claim ?

Slightly off the topic, the "check out the protection circuit" demo is impressive.. they short the outputs with a pair of pliers when doing a full volume burp, the amp goes into protection, they remove the pliers and off she goes. Don't try this at home kids

Well Kickerboy's mate with the red swift who was running his box at Summernats had one of those Schneider class-t amps... had a look at it, 120A worth of fusing on it. And he was pulling around the same numbers as Troy was pulling at Final Battle with a D2 @ 0.5ohm. Same box, different car but still a Swift, different subs well still L7's but different owners. I was impressed with the amp.

Class T is full range with the efficentcy of class D to my knowlage. and watch out of Team Digital is a Marketing Gimic will pounce soon

Class T originates from the use of a Tripath chip, and provides full range amplification with the efficiency (or sometimes even better efficiency) of a class D amplifier.

US Amps used to make a range of Class T products, which have now been replaced by a single Class "DE" product - basically the same sort of chip setup, but not a Tripath one (as far as I know anyway).

Paul

Signat have two T class amps that deliver huge power from tiny packages. We run a DIG2-400 in AJ's Civic for the front end. It makes mid 140s from the doors!

Phil

Yes Class T could be considered a digital amplifier (at least it performs some DSP operations ) I had a link somewhere that explained the technicalities of it (should be able to find via search ). They use pulse width modulation to achieve high efficiencies and then output this through what is effectively a LPF.

Problem is that this method will never produce a highly accurate output (ie it causes distortion) due to the fact you're trying to take a square PWM signal and turn it into AC via the LPF.

So in short it's not a truly digital AMP (no such thing can ever exist ) but at best it's an amplifier which using digital signal processing - a hybrid I guess... still you're not going to any more digital a amp atm

Still digital is a martketing gimick IMO because they do infact produce a lot more distortion than A/B amps - seems a bit counter intuitive to sacrifice full range clarity for an extra 20% efficiency.... I wonder what the SQ pursists would think of such things

Yeah I had an eyeball of the thing in the shop.. about the size of an A/B 4x 50.
4x 40A fuses.. big thick rails inside it too. Only 2ohm stable, but they claim 800WRMS.
And RRP <$700.

Still, I want my D2 *not one of Ripped's smoke machine D2's tho*