Two Anthem STR amp failures within 1 year

[gene]

I would say those big 8T towers aren't as difficult to drive than just the impedance graph alone might indicate, because of the good sensitivity, and you noted it even had a bump in the bass..., and, phase angle isn't horrible to that may help the average high power amps too.

From your linked review:


6500 cu.ft is big, but what's your listening distance, 4 meters, or 6 meters, or more?
Not saying anything bad about the STR amps, they are very powerful for sure, more powerful than the X350.5, for real world use for sure, when literally continuous ratings aren't as important, Anthem output specs for 2 ohm dips seems to be rated for up to 3 seconds, that's long enough. I would think real world contents rarely has bass frequencies the range shown in the impedance graph that would last longer than 3 seconds, except some rare huge pipe organ music. Again, amps like those are powerful, I am just being curious about the minor details, and, the typical marketing hype (such as "massive") that usually exaggerates things to make their points.

When I ran my 8Ts in my old theater room, I sat about 15ft from them. I drove them extremely hard since I also had LFE routed to them for multi-channel. The STR never failed me. I drove those speakers with various amps including the Emotiva XPR-1s, Pass Labs X350.5 and Classe CT-2300. Classe was my favorite of the amps with the STR being a close second. I did love the way the speakers were driven by the Emotiva XPR-1s but the Emotiva amps were not built to last and one died months after the warranty expired with no recourse to service since the brand moved on to a new platform.

The Anthem STR amp can handle 2 ohms but at 800 watts on the bench it would shut down after a couple of seconds which I noted in my review. Anthem put a lot of safe guards into this amp to not self-destruct and I never ran into any issues from them in real world use cases. I kept the amp for almost 6 years before selling it in favor of fully active speakers.