Fellow audio geeks, lend me your eyes and collective experiences. Here we see some electronics used in a high zoot system demo at the CES 2009. To me it appears we have pro-sound amplifiers pressed into service for the high end. Note the grills for forced air cooling of the mystery amps as often seen on heavy duty cycle professional amps. The pearl and red plates around the centered level knobs and status LEDs look to be added, the pearl plate even matching the finish of the speakers on display. I believe these amps are driving mucho bridged watts into the subwoofers as a very high end tube amp is displayed front and center between the main speakers.
Does anyone recognize these amps? My guess was QSC or Crown knowing when it comes to stone reliable amps able to deliver outputs better measured in horse power rather than watts they are the go to guys. Current model QSC amps look similar but not quite what is seen here.
How about it guys, anyone recognize the mystery amps? For extra credit identify the black box on top of the amps which I believe to be the crossover again a pro-audio model. Zooming in on the high res version of this picture the crossover has a 9 pin serial port connector, LEDs labeled “PRESET” & “ID”, and buttons “UP”, “DOWN”, “SELECT”, “ENTER”. My guess for the crossover is the no display version of the dbx Driverack DSP box.
Once we have a winner I will reveal the system these are part of.
For the record my intent is not to reverse engineer this system. What I am about is pointing out that at a certain level of our pursuit bi- and tri-amping along with DSP technologies should be considered along with $10,000 cables as paths to higher performance.
