PKN evaluation results

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   Evening.  Thought it might be worthwhile for me to give some feedback on my recent experiments with the PKN amps.

Dan at PKN kindly dropped down a rack of demo amps to Blue Aran for myself and Ed to play with.  We did some listening tests against my normal amp rack then he left them with us to try out.

The amps we have been playing with were an XE2500, XE4000, XE6000 and LC4004.

In listening tests against my rack of a QSC PL4.0 on sub and a Pulse 2x1100 on mid-high (both pretty good sounding amps) there was a noticable difference in the sound but none of us could exactly identify what it was or which set of amps we preferred.  With the XE6000 driving a pair of twin 18" reflex subs and the XE4000 connected to a pair of 15"+1.4" passive mid-tops they sounded clean, accurate and solid.  Definitely no shortage of power, especially from the XE6000.  There is a little background hiss as you tend to associate with class D amps but only noticable if you're listening for it.

I had the opportunity to take the amps out on a little gig and used the XE6000 to run 4 single 18" bins and the XE4000 to run 4 Nexo PS15's as additional system in a local bar while Mr Scruff played some tunes.  I have previously done this job with Camco Vortex 6's and in comparison the XE6000 on subs seemed to be hardly doing any work at all.  In fact according to the built-in metering, the highest I saw was about 500W/channel whereas I would normally expect the Camco's to be running quite close to their limit.  The high efficiency and active PFC meant that despite the mains supply being a pathetic 215V, the amps really couldn't have cared less.

Back in the office, I decided to try the XE4000 out on the bench as a representative of the range.  Output power with one channel driven in to 4Ohms matched the rated power very closely, I measured 2.2kW, spec is 2.1kW.  I also tried some class D torture test square waves which it handled very well.  A little overshoot on the leading edge but very little ringing on a 1kHz square.  A 10kHz square wave was turned into more of a sine wave with just the first couple of harmonics as you'd expect but the amp still managed to drive that to full power without any complaints (I only did that for a very short test just in case!).  According to my energy monitor, when the amp is running hard, I actually saw the power factor at unity but mostly higher than 0.95 which is very good indeed.

We also tested the LC4004 in both listening and bench tests.  It has noticably more background noise at idle than the XE amps however we had one from an older batch.  I'm told there has been a revision to the design which reduces this to the same or lower than the XD/XE series.  Power output on the bench was slightly less than the specs which was a little dissapointing.  However they are still very useful 4 channel, 1U amps.

In general I am very impressed by these amps and would not hesitate to recommend them.  If you need an amp to drive the big boy sub drivers like the 1851, then the XD/XE6000 is definitely worth considering.  The fact that they are light, compact and able to extract the maximum from their mains supply makes them very good all-round amps.