Crown is located only about 20 miles from me in Elkhart, Indiana. They make some of the best power amps in the business. I'll relate a sad story because it still angers me.
Back in the mid 1990's Crown developed a power amp for the high end home audio industry. It was a Class A behemoth that provided 250 watts per channel at 8 ohms and doubled its way down the impedance ratings. It was stable into a short circuit. It was as clean as a whistle with specs that would stand up against anything made anywhere. Even the components in the unit were all high end - I mean things like capacitors and transformers and resistors. However, unlike the competition - Krell etc. this went to market at half their price.
Then along came the high end audio magazines. They couldn't handle the idea of a pro audio company making a product of this caliber and they couldn't handle seeing a superior performer priced at half the other superior performers in the industry. So they panned it. Were they wrong? They sure were. We did bias controlled tests with this amp against a Krell of similar power and they sounded exactly the same just as one would expect.
Nevertheless, they panned it and destroyed it as a product. Crown never ventured into the home audio market place again. That has always bugged me since I'm a fan of Crown and I know some of the engineers there. The product was treated unfairly and it made the magazines look bad in my view rather than Crown.
Having said that, I can assure you that the Crown products made today for the pro audio market are as good as anything in the home audio market and better than most. That includes models that sell for as little as $300. The more powerful ones have cooling fans so you need to be able to deal with that. They are powerful enough that you can put them in the next room. They are routinely used with speaker cables that are hundreds of feet in length.
Sorry for the rant. I didn't mean for it to be a commercial. I just thought you would enjoy seeing the specs for a really big amp.
