Just wanted to share a recent Crown XLS experience:
I purchased one XLS1500 at the Millbury, MA Guitar Center on 01/16/2012. The in-store sale price was hard to pass up ($340) and their return policy is fairly liberal, so I figured it was worth a shot.
To keep this post entirely objective, I will say nothing about my opinions regarding sound quality. Moving forward, I had a few issues:
The pre-amp outputs on my Yamaha RX-V667 receiver were not quite hot enough to drive the Crown amp without cranking the Gain adjustment. At ~75% gain, there was still a 6dB mismatch between channels (which I was able to even out using the YPAO parametric EQ). At this higher gain level, I easily heard more "noise" from my Mirage speakers at idle which was not present using the amplifiers in my Yamaha receiver. This of course was not a "fault" of the amplifier necessarily.
What WAS a fault of the amplifier was that the channels were not level-matched side to side. I attribute this either to the gain controls, which did not have matching detents, or a faulty output transformer in one of the channels. With the gain controls matched as closely as possible, and the pre-amp outputs on the receiver set to identical values, I consistently measured the right channel 2dB lower than the left.
Otherwise, the Crown ran extremely cool during extended high-volume playback and remained very quiet otherwise. The fan on the rear panel turned on once or twice, and was inaudible from >3 feet away.
Guitar Center was very understanding of the issue and took the amp back without pause; thankfully I was not charged the customary 15% open-box restocking fee.
