power amps....

[tereehart]

I love the sound of my Swr 400 watt amp. It's perfect for what I do but, I need more power. I grabbed some cabs that handle more wattage so the question is, can I just simply add a power amp to my rig or is that going to cause problems?

[vivifiction]

I'm pretty inexperienced with power amps, but check to see if your amp has a "preamp out" output. That should run the preamp stage of your amp into an external power amp.

[mowburger]

You could use the 1/4" line out or the XLR out to feed an amp, no prob.

Depending on the cab/s I might suggest bypassing the SWR's power section and just use it as a preamp, or you could run one cab with the SWR's power section and another cab with a poweramp, lots of posabilitys reallly.

[seamonkey]

Agreed with the above. You probably like the sound out of the pre-amp so you can feed a power amp with this. What cab do you have? In case you want more of the same.

[T-Bird]

Hi.

Steve made it easy for You when he included the cross-over and thus the ability to biamp in the package.

IOW, RTFM, available free on the SWR website.

Regards
Sam

[lbwdog]

Originally Posted by T-Bird

Hi.

Steve made it easy for You when he included the cross-over and thus the ability to biamp in the package.

IOW, RTFM, available free on the SWR website.

Regards
Sam

I don't get what "biamping" has to do with the OP's question. He said nothing about splitting the frequency range, only if he could use another amp for more power.

As noted above, yes, you could run a different amp from your existing pre-amp out. You Can't, however, just put another amp in the signal chain while still using the SWR's power amp
section.

[JimmyM]

wouldn't want to move a rig with a head and a separate power amp. plus you get way more of a boost with more cab than extra wattage. 400w through an 810 can take your head off, for example. what did you get for cabs?

[::::BASSIST::::]

Originally Posted by tereehart

I love the sound of my Swr 400 watt amp. It's perfect for what I do but, I need more power. I grabbed some cabs that handle more wattage so the question is, can I just simply add a power amp to my rig or is that going to cause problems?

The answer is yes you can. Just use the preamp out. However, as Jimmy mentioned, it will be a heavy mofo to carry all that stuff.

[edervjo]

There is a lot of mis-information out there, but here are some basic physics about sound and power that should help.

10db is considered "twice as loud". It take 10x amp power to achieve this through the same cabinet. (100w to 1000w) Usually you melt your speaker.
Doubling the sound sources(speakers) will get 3db louder, 2 speakers as to 1, 4 as to two, etc.
Doubling the amp power will get the same 3 db, but again, watch the power rating on the speaker.
Watch the THD distortion % of any amp. My Crest puts out 900w at .01%, Ampeg rates their 1000w amp at 1%, which is 100 times more distortion. This means much less headroom, much less reserve power.

Look for the 1watt/1meter sensitivity of any speaker, more is louder for the amount of power being delivered into it. Efficiency is key to designing small rigs.

Hope this helps you build that dream rig, and still be able to move it!!

[JimmyM]

Originally Posted by edervjo

Watch the THD distortion % of any amp. My Crest puts out 900w at .01%, Ampeg rates their 1000w amp at 1%, which is 100 times more distortion. This means much less headroom, much less reserve power.

hardly. while it is, indeed, 100x more distortion at the 1000w mark, it's still way unnoticeable. you might hear it if you have it turned up to the full extent of its clean volume, but at volumes where more normal people play , it's unnoticeable. everything else you said was correct, though.