Cone ripped.

You would be surprised how much the loudspeaker plays a part on the Tone. Bear in mind loudspeakers for guitar amplifiers are designed to distort. You can visit Eminence website in which, you can evaluate various tones through their guitar speakers.

In the Pro Audio world, to attain such tones usually stems from over driving something in the audio

chain. This could be accomplished from the amplifier or some means of processing above the amplifier stage. However, over driving the amplifier is bound to destroy the loudspeaker since Pro Audio Loudspeakers are not designed to distort like guitar speakers. So if you are aiming for a certain type of Tone (being a guitarists) the most obvious solution would be to stick a guitar pedal (Big Muff) in the audio chain if you must have a more distorted sound.

Best Regards,

Are you paying for reliability with amps then?

Also, if power amps are effectively two amps, how independent are the two channels? Can you run them at difference ohm?

Instrument amps have two parts, the preamp and the power amp. The preamp is where the tone comes from. Instrument preamps have circuitry specifically designed to change the input signal in some way. For example an electric guitar amp having bass, mid and treble controls - When these are all in the middle, the EQ is not flat at all. If you plug an electric guitar into a flat preamp all you get is a flappy, midrange heavy sound with no weight or sparkle. So the preamp cuts a lot of midrange or boosts the treble and bass "as standard", even when all EQ knobs are at 50%. This gives the tone you expect from a clean guitar amp channel. There are also things like "bright" and "deep" switches that activate fixed EQ on the signal.

Then you have the option of overdriving the preamp to introduce distortion. PA amps are designed to avoid this completely. Indeed if you try to overdrive their input a lot of PA amps will just shut down.

A stereo PA amp is indeed two seperate power amps in a box, with either one power supply for both or two independent supplies. So yes, you can amplify completely different signals on each channel, and they can be loaded differently. There are even power amps eg Crown 24x6 which have one high-power channel for heavy loads eg bass, and one lower powered channel for lighter loads such as tweeters.

You do pay more for reliability - this is where a lot of cheap power amps fall down. Sure it works now but 6 months from new it may just sh1t the bed for no apparent reason and cost you as much as you paid for it to get fixed. Less "affordable" brands normally have long warranties and a reputation for not breaking. EG Crown 5000VZ is over 25 years old now but there are still units being sold for the best part of £1000 as very few amps can match it for power and longevity. Whereas eg Prosound, Soundlab amps don't even make it onto the secondhand market because they all just get blown up in short order and scrapped.